Bone Gods

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 faintly of him. Whiskey, cigarettes, and sweat. Jack, in one breath. Pete