Bone Gods

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 across 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