Bone Gods

shoes, Pete climbed onto the bed and grabbed the print by the edges, lifting it off the hook.
    The blood was fresh enough that it gleamed in the low bedroom light, and it had dribbled down McCorkle’s bland coffee-colored walls in slow rivulets. The lettering was a bit bigger than Pete’s hand and she nearly fell at the onslaught of black magic on her senses. The message, though, was a simple one.
    THE SERPENT BECOMES THE WORLD

CHAPTER 15
    Patel was less than pleased with Pete’s discovery. In fact, she’d wager she’d never seen a detective from the Met get quite so volcanic, quite so quickly. She could still hear him cursing at Ollie in the other room, shouting at what a mess this was, since clearly he didn’t get up again after slitting his own throat and write us a fucking note. A uniform watched Pete with the stern glare of a young but earnest schoolteacher.
    “Oh, calm down,” Pete told the plod. “Be grateful he’s not screaming at you, just because he can.”
    “He’s a twat,” the officer said, clearly desperate for a sympathetic third party to relay that bit of information to. “Nearly got me fired last month because I had to go take a piss and left my partner alone at a perimeter.”
    Pete looked back at the letters in McCorkle’s blood. She’d ended up here as a favor to Ollie, and the simple hope that if she tried hard enough to move on, to finish a job and find a bad apple without Jack, she’d be able to actually do it. To have closure.
    But now … now they’d made it personal, and they’d killed someone to do it. Jack would never have let it go this far. He would have known what he was looking at the moment Carver’s body turned up in the museum. Wouldn’t have thrashed around in the dark for days and let McCorkle end up skewered. It had to be her fault. The necromancers who’d nearly happened on her at Wapping had decided to take a more direct route and reach her and Heath in one swift stroke. We know where you live. Even here, in the bosom of your copper’s sanctuary, you are not safe.
    “You all right, miss?” said the constable. “Stuffy in here, ain’t it?”
    “I’d murder a glass of water,” Pete said. “Could you be a love? If I go out there I think Patel’s liable to rip off my face and spit down my neck.”
    The constable snorted a phglemy laugh. “Sure, miss. You wait here like he said though, yeah? I need this job.”
    Pete sighed. If this was the caliber of soul populating the new, young Met, the criminal underworld should be throwing a fucking soirée.
    As soon as the constable vanished into the en suite, Pete went for McCorkle’s drawers. She could explain McCorkle topping himself, miserable bastard that he’d been, but not the writing—word for word what Morningstar had read to her from his bloody book, hidden in a place that the crime scene techs wouldn’t have found for days, if not weeks—plenty of time for McCorkle to be filed as a suicide and the file to be pushed to the bottom of Patel’s pile. Plus there was the small matter of whoever had orchestrated this little abattoir choosing McCorkle in the first place. He had no history with occult crimes and even less history with the Black.
    Morningstar could conceivably have had time to do it—he could have sent Dreisden and his razor after McCorkle—but she’d been in his study, within strangling distance, and he’d let her walk out again. Besides, Morningstar wasn’t about knives in the back. He was a shock-and-awe type, assaulting the wicked with the righteous fury of his own self-importance.
    And neither Morningstar nor the Order explained the black magic. The necromancer who’d gone after McCorkle wanted something from her, had practically painted her name on the wall along with the phrase.
    Pete didn’t put stock in prophecies, and for all she knew the phrase about the serpent was as well-known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” among necromancers. There was a plethora of serpents in Revelation, even, the fan fiction of religious texts: And the dragon fought and his angels. Slithery things were all over magic texts, from Babylon to the Golden Dawn. But if the necromancer was reaching out to her with the tip of his blade, then what, exactly, was the message Pete was supposed to receive?
    Jack would know. Pete tossed the drawers faster, hearing the water shut off and the constable begin his plodding return to the room. Jack would know, which was no bloody help to her, because the