Bone Gods

from the gaping second smile in his throat, of course, and the blood pool under him, nearly as wide as Pete was tall, seeping into the base of the Ramses bust that glowered above her like an irritable graven image.
    “You have a guess as to what they cut his throat with?” Pete asked Nasiri, out of habit. Perhaps she’d get lucky, and it would be as simple as a jealous colleague or a spat over a girl, or a boy. Nothing that needed a person familiar with sacrifice and ritual killing to pin the slit throat and the peculiar placement of the corpse as such.
    The doctor consulted her tablet PC, screen covered in handwritten notes around an electronic diagram of a body, with the wounds picked out as shaded portions. “Some kind of single-edge blade, long and thin,” she said. “Until I’ve made examination of the wound in my lab I can’t be more specific, I’m afraid.”
    “Right then,” Pete said, deciding that if Nasiri wasn’t going to be forward, she would. “What’s spooked you so much you won’t come within three feet of the dearly departed?”
    “When my crew started to move the body, one of them lost their grip,” Nasiri said. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and her voice constricted down to just above a whisper. “The victim’s shirt slipped open.”
    Pete leaned over and tugged aside the collar of the dead man’s cotton Oxford. Her breath hitched in her throat. When she saw his flesh, she understood why Ollie had called.
    Cuts covered the dead man’s torso, slices and slashes so precise and intricate they’d make Jack the Ripper weep happy tears. Lines and loops and circles, deep and shallow, cuts over cuts over scar tissue, inflicted over years. Newer wounds had been cauterized, the skin around them black with infection. The older scars grew together, twined like white, shiny vines in a fleshy garden.
    The scarring and cutting interlocked to form symbols that had no heads and no tails, but were a continuous pattern over every centimeter of visible skin. They traveled from just under the dead man’s collar, down his chest, and over his stomach, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. They were nothing familiar to Pete, which was troubling in and of itself. Magical symbolism worked as a kind of shorthand, across all the various disciplines and religions contained within—a pentagram could be co-opted by hairy-legged hippies, true, but it was also shorthand for a white witch, to tell things from the nasty side of magic to step the fuck off.
    These symbols were practiced and deliberate, and Pete couldn’t make sense of them, except that they made her head hurt, deep down near the base of her skull. The power in the dead man’s skin vibrated her back teeth, the power that the carvings gave off nearly palpable, like the stench of decay would be in a few more hours. No wonder Ollie and Dr. Nasiri were giving him a wide berth. You didn’t need a talent to sense when something unnatural and rotten was in your psychic space. It was a simple human survival mechanism, to recognize the Other, and run from it fast as your two feet would take you.
    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.”

CHAPTER 2
    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