Bone Gods

partner,” he explained. “Useless as an armless lesbian with a box of dildos, that one. Freddy!” he bellowed, waving at the man. “You’re bloody late!”
    He descended the steps to berate McCorkle further, leaving Pete by herself.
    She turned away and went back into the museum, across the broad modern lobby, past the glass case holding the Rosetta Stone, past the winged Assyrian statues arranged as they had been in their birthplace, as gates into a stranger world. It shouldn’t sting that Ollie had finally gotten around to being assigned a new partner. She’d been gone from the Met for over a year. If she was going to come back, she’d be back. Ollie should be moved on, and the only sorrow she should feel was that Newell had saddled him with some baby-faced detective constable, still dazzled at the thought of being in plainclothes.
    She walked past the smaller pharaohs—at least in relation to Ramses—and back to poor Gerard Carver’s corpse. Whatever his proclivities in life, bleeding out on a cold floor was a hard end for anyone. But it wasn’t as if he’d been a victim chosen out of a hat. Jack had at least taught her that the innocent and pure rarely got swept up in the undertow of black magic completely without their accord. People turned to sorcery for lots of reasons, most of them utterly mundane, and those people usually ended up exactly like Carver, plus or minus a few stab wounds.
    Magic wasn’t really so different from everyday life. People were petty, selfish, spiteful bastards no matter what side of the river you walked on. Pete took her mobile from her bag, tapped over to the camera screen, snapped a clear shot of Carver’s exposed torso. She shoved the phone back into her bag before Nasiri caught her.
    Again, this close to the corpse, she felt the vibration in the air, the spells that the symbols on Carver’s body had woven when he was alive lingering as if a cluster of spectral flies still hovered above the dead man’s carcass.
    Jack would have known exactly what type of spell Carver’s murderer had woven around him. He could see the fabric of spells, as clearly as Pete could see the dead man himself. Jack could have told Ollie what breed of sorcerer had cast the abominable thing, and likely what sort of biscuits he fancied and what pub you could find the bastard in. Jack had a sight that most people never opened their eyes to, least of all those with a talent as prodigious as his. Being magically and psychically inclined left you with roughly the same brain chemistry as a schizophrenic enjoying the world’s most realistic acid trip. Jack kept himself together better than most, but seeing everything was far more than anyone could accept. There had been the drugs, the year-long blackouts, the suicide attempts, and the associated symptoms any normal person would tell Pete she was well rid of.
    She couldn’t argue, and she couldn’t force herself to see things her mind simply wouldn’t wrap around the same way Jack’s did. She could only observe, and record, and try to solve her side of the mystery the old-fashioned way, with skills she’d learned at the Yard rather than from her talent.
    Her talent didn’t lend itself to exposing black magic, to fighting monsters and seeing ghosts. She was only a vessel for talent far greater than her own, like a transformer on a wire.
    She backed away as the medical examiner’s team, fortified against the markings on Carver now that Pete had gotten close and not burst into flame, laid down a body bag next to the dead man and prepared to roll him into it. Pete was done with Carver, and done with the knocking of his mutilated corpse against her psychic senses. She needed to be outside, away from the site of Carver’s murder and the older, darker magic of the artifacts at rest around her. It was warm and amber, scented like honey, seductive as a warm pool of water that invited her to slip under and forget.…
    Pete nearly knocked into a uniformed plod before she managed to exit the museum by the service entrance, where her red Mini Cooper was parked behind a phalanx of Met vehicles, Ollie’s nondescript Vauxhall, and Nasiri’s van.
    She got in and turned the arthritic engine over—the car was older than she by an order of a decade. Her mum had left it behind when she’d done a runner, and Pete had been driving it since she’d convinced her da, DI Caldecott the elder, she was to be trusted with the keys. Mistakenly, of course—she’d