Bone Gods

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.

CHAPTER 11
    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.