Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Wipe that look off your face,” Morningstar said. “I told you. It’s a sign.”

  Pete stayed still, but she did him the grace of turning around and not saying anything snide. There was a window behind Morningstar, but it only faced the brick of the next house. She probably couldn’t break the glass without a running start. The front door was far away. At least Lawrence would eventually call Ollie if she didn’t come back out.

  “A time ago, when I was searching for Charity, I happened across a book.” Morningstar produced a key and used it to open a small compartment in the wall. He pulled out a small volume and opened it with great care. “It was just a scribbling, a transcription of a Babylonian grimoire that some speed-addled mage had set down while he was high and touching the face of Ishtar,” Morningstar murmured. “But I know it’s the truth. Thirty years, Miss Caldecott. I’ve built my life around this page, right here.”

  “Brilliant,” Pete said. “Care to share so I can get on with my day?”

  “The serpent winds the world,” Morningstar read. His voice was so soft that Pete had to step closer to hear it, overshadowed by a ticking clock and someone moving about in another part of the house. “The serpent devours the world. The bone gods dance in dreaming. The serpent becomes the world.”

  Morningstar shut the book and placed his hand on the cover. “Nearly three thousand years ago, someone in Babylon predicted the end of days, Miss Caldecott. And it’s here. It’s all around us. And you—you’re right here. With us.”

  Pete found her mouth was dry when she tried to speak. “That doesn’t mean anything. There’s hundreds of prophecies back in my flat, in Jack’s books. You can set about as much stock by them as by some bloke on a street corner yelling about the lizard men.”

  “It’s true,” Morningstar said, “and some part of you believes it, or you wouldn’t have come straight here.”

  “I came here because you’re irritating me,” Pete said. “And I’m working the Carver thing because I have to. You or any of your trenchcoat brigade come at me again, and I will take it personally. You read me?”

  “You’re going to get in over your head unless you let me help you,” Morningstar insisted. “And for that, you need to accept the truth of those words.”

  Pete jabbed a finger into Ethan’s chest when he got inside her personal bubble and tried to do the soothing hand-on-the-shoulder move favored by teachers wanting too badly to be liked and perverted older men playing on daddy issues.

  “I don’t need protection,” she said. “I’m not a shy baby bird left helpless because I don’t have the great Jack Winter watching me. I don’t need another set of minders. And if I did, your psychotic mouth-breather brigade would be the very last I’d ask.”

  Deciding she’d probably said enough to cause Morningstar to want her dead, even if he hadn’t before, Pete turned around and left.

  “Petunia, I’m serious…” Morningstar started, but she held two fingers over her head.

  “Sod off, Ethan!” She slammed the front door on him, cutting off the oppressive silence of the Order’s headquarters for the buzz and hum of the street.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ollie rang just as Pete was running a bath, and she shut off the water, sitting on the edge of the tub. “Yeah, Ollie?”

  She unlaced her boots, cradling the phone and letting the steel toes thump to the tile.

  “Tell me you have something for me,” Ollie muttered. He sounded as if he were muffling the phone. The gentle hum of the incident room was missing, and Pete heard water trickling.

  “Ollie, are you in the loo?”

  “Newell found out,” Ollie said. “Tore me up one side and down the other. Pete, just tell me you found something before I’m out on my arse and back in Yorkshire, writing traffic citations to combine harvesters.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. She peeled off her damp, sweat-encrusted blouse, trousers, and bra while swapping Ollie to speaker. Her head had begun to throb as soon as she left the Order’s house, but she’d braved it until she was in the flat and could ride out the hallucinogenic hangover in peace. Her cheek was cut deeper than she’d thought, and blood had trickled down her jaw on the tube. On the upside, she’d gotten an entire bench on the Hammersmith & City train to herself. Hospital was out of the question, but she’d need to at least glue it shut if she didn’t want to look like she’d been attacked by a werewolf. “Shit,” she muttered as fresh blood oozed down her cheek when she prodded.

  “You found shit?” Ollie barked. “Pete, don’t bloody do this to me!”

  “Wasn’t talking to you, was I?” Pete sighed. “Look, the markings on Carver weren’t a killing spell, they were some musty old Babylonian ritual, and I haven’t found much else yet. That bit mean anything?”

  “Might,” Ollie said. “Carver worked with Babylonian and Egyptian antiquities. If it was within a thousand miles of the Fertile Crescent, he had his paws on it, is the word from his boss. And we’ve found some irregularities with his customs manifests, now that the tech wanks have poked a bit. Seems old Gerard wasn’t so squeaky as he appeared. May have even been selling off odd bits of history on the side. His mum has a very nice little terrace for a pensioner who thinks her next door neighbor is a German spy.”

  “I’d really love to get another look at the room he died in,” Pete said. “I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble to carve someone up, wouldn’t you do it in private? Why dump him like an exhibit, unless it meant something to you?”

  “I might be able to get the curator to let us have another go,” Ollie said. “Assuming Newell doesn’t fire me when I get back from taking a piss. Can you meet at the museum after closing hours?”

  Pete gave up trying to stanch the gash with a washcloth and reached into the cabinet for peroxide. “Yeah. Around eight?”

  “Eight it is,” Ollie said. “And you better pull a rabbit out of your hat that sings fucking Morrissey, because Newell is apoplectic.”

  “No pressure for me to have some sort of clever day-saving plan, then,” Pete muttered.

  “You’re tops,” Ollie said. “Cheers.”

  “Fuck you,” Pete told him, but he’d already rung off. She tossed her mobile and went into the bedroom to retrieve Jack’s half-arsed first aid kit, which consisted of a crumbled box of Band-Aids, gauze, Super Glue, and a fifth of whiskey.

  Daubing the wound with antiseptic was the worst part, although she supposed she could count herself lucky that it was real peroxide solution and not something cheap and ninety-proof that Jack had pulled out of some dank cabinet in his terrifying excuse for a kitchen.

  Pete hissed as the blood stained a collection of cotton wool pink. She irrigated the wound with a bit of contact lens solution—poor man’s saline—and dabbed Super Glue along the lower edge, careful to keep it off her fingertips. Once the skin had knit, she slapped on a piece of surgical tape and took a quick gulp from the whiskey bottle before shoving the whole mess out of sight under the basin.

  She’d gone her entire Met career without being stabbed, and it wasn’t until she’d seen Jack again that grievous bodily harm became the order of the day. This wasn’t a bad wound, but it was a bad reminder of both how lucky and how completely stupid she’d been, drinking down the Antiquarian’s potion and diving into the whole Carver mess, necromancers leaving corpses strewn all over the city and Carver’s living friends itching to shove her soul in a box for their tally.

  Jack would have been smart. He’d have found a way out of both ends of this by now, and he didn’t need any sodding poison tea to open his third eye. This was Jack’s life. Pete slipped into a nightgown hanging on the door of the loo and then went into the bedroom and let herself drop onto the mattress, boneless. Jack’s life. But she the one left living it. Pete had no idea how that was fucking fair, but there it was.

  Her nightgown was another of Jack’s shirts, soft from wear and washing until it was nearly transparent. She’d run it through the laundry, but the fabric still smelled faint
ly of him. Whiskey, cigarettes, and sweat. Jack, in one breath. Pete was relieved she was too tired to have to stop herself from crying, and that her mind was too cluttered to relive the touch of Jack’s hands against her bare skin. She curled up on the mattress, pulling the blankets over her head to shut out the daylight, and was asleep before she even realized she was falling.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ollie met Pete at the freight entrance to the British Museum, and together they walked through the back hallways to the silent, dark exhibits. The head curator, boss of Carver’s boss, was a little woman named Matthews who giggled at everything Ollie said whether it was funny or not. She led them to Gerard Carver’s office, buried deep back in the maze of the museum not open to the public. It was a shabby little office that fit the shabby little man Carver had been in life. Pete shifted the journals and printouts around a bit, seeing if she could catch a glimpse of either of his other lives—fanatic witchfinder or sleazy necromancer—until Matthews cleared her throat and drew her bushy brows together.

  “Sorry,” Ollie told her. “Miss Caldecott sometimes forgets where she is.”

  “As I was telling you on the telephone,” Matthews said. “Now that we’ve examined the manifests Mr. Carver signed for more carefully, there are several glaring inconsistencies. It’s terrible. Really terrible. All of our employees pass a thorough background check.”

  “You think he was sellin’ the stuff?” Ollie said. Matthews put a hand to the collar of her fuzzy pink jumper, as if Ollie had asked what her sign was.

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, Chief Inspector. I don’t deal on the black market. I believe antiquities are for the world to appreciate, and they should be preserved.”

  “And nothing says preservation like hacking them off the side of the Pantheon, does it?” Pete said, shoving another stack of magazines just to take the piss.

  “The museum does a service for the entire world,” Matthews snapped. “Our methods were not always sound but we take the greater good into consideration, and if Gerard was selling these items to private collectors, then he’s violated the most sacred trust a curator is given.”

  “It’s just Inspector,” Ollie injected. “I’m a DI. Can you account for what’s missing?”

  “Oh, yes.” Matthews brandished a printout as if she’d been challenged to a duel. “Here’s a complete list. Five items, mostly Babylonian funerary items. Nothing that was terribly valuable, which is how they were overlooked. Gerard signed them out for cleaning and simply never signed them back in.”

  Ollie skimmed the list and then handed it off to Pete. The manifests contained a few lines of description, a log of the object’s activity once it entered the museum, and who’d signed it out. “Idols?” she said.

  “Oh my, yes,” said Matthews. “The Babylonians in particular attached enormous importance to their idols. They believed their gods and heroes resided simultaneously in their stone and ethereal form. Great care was taken with them.”

  Pete pointed to the last item. “And this?”

  “A jar, I believe,” said Matthews. “Just a household item but very nice. We would have used it for the rotating exhibits—life in the Bronze Age, you know. The sort of thing schoolchildren enjoy.”

  “Yeah,” Ollie said. “Always liked that, at school. We got to go to a recreated Roman village once. Thought that was tops when I was a kid.”

  “The jar was the last thing to go missing,” Pete told him. Carver had signed it out one day before his death, in fact, and hadn’t bothered to jot down an excuse.

  “Maybe he fancied it,” Matthews said. “You do get attached to your objects, as a curator. They’re pieces of the world, the bones of history that we build on. You see?”

  “Think I’d rather have a cat,” Pete told her. “You got a picture?” If Carver was stealing antiquities, Pete would lay even money that it was only partially to fund his side activities of fiddling with the dead. Magic objects had a way of slipping between the cracks, turning up in junk shops and attics, until someone with the right radar happened on them. Jack’s flat was a prime example.

  “Somewhere in the database, of course,” Matthews agreed. “I’ll have to look it up via inventory number and then I could mail it to DI Heath, if he’d be so kind as to give me his e-mail address.”

  Ollie cleared his throat and scribbled on the back of one of his cards before handing it over.

  “How lovely,” Matthews beamed. “I’ll do it straightaway in the morning. Now I’m afraid I must be going—I don’t care to be walking the streets after nine p.m. It’s not safe. Of course you understand.”

  “It’s a veritable Wild West out there in darkest Bloomsbury,” Ollie said. Matthews batted her pale eyelashes at him once more before taking her leave. Ollie started to follow, but Pete caught him and shook her head. She pointed down the hallway to the public area.

  “I’d like to get one more look,” she said. “See if I can’t figure out why they left him there.”

  “Just make sure that bloody woman doesn’t pop ’round the corner,” Ollie muttered, beating a hasty retreat after her.

  “You going to take her out, then?” Pete said. “I bet her knickers match her jumper.”

  “Fuck off,” Ollie told her. “You think you could have slagged her off any more? She’s a witness, and I have to deal with her now.”

  “I think one look at that chiseled jawline and manly chest you’re sporting and she’ll forgive you anything, Chief Inspector Heath,” Pete said.

  “You’re a horrid person and you’re going straight to Hell,” Ollie informed her.

  Pete didn’t really feel her good humor, but she allowed herself to punch Ollie on the shoulder rather than cringe. Being with Ollie was a good distraction—she could fall back into their familiar rhythms and not think about necromancers, the Order, or her bloody mother.

  She got out her pocket torch when they reached the Egyptian Room, a cavern of shadow on shadow in the faint light coming from the outside. The floor had been scrubbed clean, a scrape of roughness under her boot the only sign that blood had lain there long enough to soak into the marble. The leaking power from around Carver’s body had gone, but she could still feel the threads of magic here—worn and frayed, drifting among the artifacts, and more recent, sharp and grasping, like a nest of thorny vines.

  “Why here?” she said, flashing her light over Ramses II. Ollie scratched at his temple.

  “Psychiatrist would say he’s making a statement, wouldn’t they? Telling us something from dumping the poor git here.”

  “Or he’s bragging,” Pete said. We know where you sleep and work. Even here, among the oldest magic on earth, you’re not safe.

  “Or he’s a lazy sod who couldn’t be arsed to drag the body the rest of the way down to the trash compactor,” Ollie said.

  Pete clicked the light off. “Thought maybe this would make one of us clever.”

  “Clever’s your bit,” Ollie said. Pete looked down at the spot where Carver had lain. In the dark, it was easy to imagine his slumped shape, imagine whoever had dragged him here, tugged on his hair to bare his throat, and done him in with one clean slash.

  And then … tossed the knife in the bin and fucked off down the pub?

  “Ollie, did the security tapes get anything?” Pete said. He snorted.

  “You think I’d still be here if we’d caught anything on CCTV?” He gestured at the corners of the room. “State of the art, but someone using Carver’s login shut ’em off through the mainframe. Fancy stuff. Security guard who found the body said he’d heard noises—you know, our old friend, suspicious sounds. Beyond that, whatever he was up to in here before he died is between him and his god.”

  Pete thought of the bloody marks on Carver’s torso, fresh and red and dripping when Nasiri pulled his shirt aside. “He was there,” she told Ollie.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Wait. Who?”

  “The Pope. The guy who did Carver, Ollie.” Pete scuffed her toe acros
s the spot. “Carver killed the cameras because Carver wasn’t expecting to die. He was expecting to carve himself up and do a ritual, sure, but I’m thinking he found out that a human sacrifice was the bonus behind the curtain.”

  “And that didn’t sit well, so he kicked up a fuss,” Ollie said, looking toward the main lobby of the museum. “The guard interrupted ’em.”

  “It’s not finished,” Pete said. “Whatever Carver was doing, it’s not finished.”

  “Good, I think,” Ollie said. “Trying to work dodgy spells amid a bunch of mummies never ends well in those programs where the girl kicks high and stakes the vampires.”

  “Not good,” Pete said. “Because if they didn’t finish with Carver, they’re going to finish it with someone else.”

  Carver hadn’t been working death magic because he hadn’t expected to die. But any spell worked in flesh and carried out with funerary relics wasn’t something that was going to cause pink unicorns and toffees to rain from the sky. “I think we need to look at Carver’s house,” Pete said. “And I think I need to find out who his friends were off the clock.”

  “You can’t come along to his house,” Ollie said. “Newell will shit his own testicles. But if you were to take it upon yourself, as a good citizen of my fair city, to make discreet inquiries, well. I’d be obligated to follow any leads, as an officer of the law.”

  “Cheers,” Pete said. Ollie started to reply, but his mobile went.

  “Heath,” he grumbled. Then, his breath hitched, and Pete’s stomach twinged. She knew the pause, knew the slack absence of expression that caused Ollie’s jowls to bag. She saw it in more than enough faces to memorize during her Met days, when she appeared on doorsteps, delivering bad news.

  “Where?” Ollie bit out. “Fucking when?” A few seconds of silence and then, “Right. I’m coming now.”

  “What is it?” Pete said. Ollie’s face was blank as she’d ever seen it, and he gripped his mobile in his fist so that it chirped as his grip mashed the buttons. “Ollie,” Pete said, running to keep up with his broad stride. “What’s happened?”