Bone Gods

Black was changing, and the nightmares were getting bolder.
    “You need me?” he said. “Where are you?”
    “South London,” Pete said. “And no, it’s fine for now.” She started to ring off and then put her mobile back to her ear. “Lawrence, you know of any clubs in the Black use a hand stamp? Ace of spades?”
    “Not in the Black,” he said. “But there’s one on this side, down on your side of the river. Moves around a lot—ain’t exactly got a bar license. Called Motor. Why?”
    “You have a last known?” Pete said.
    “Got a number,” Lawrence said. He banged about for a moment, read it off, and then disconnected without a goodbye. Pete wrote it down on her arm. It was a Southwark exchange, but she couldn’t very well go bursting in without any sort of preparation. Besides, she was exhausted and cut up and bruised in seven colors. She had to at least stop at home and clean up. And get her pepper spray and her baton, because if the men responsible were sending zombies, she was going to have to send back something more than wits.
    Pete caught a bus and managed to doze a bit on the way, but by the time she was back in Whitechapel she was mainly acutely aware that she’d taken a hard fall. Her hand wasn’t cut as badly as she’d thought, but it was a mess of purple where she’d slammed it into the iron fence, and she couldn’t close it very well.
    Just what she needed—to go about for the next two weeks looking as if an irate boyfriend had tossed her down a flight of stairs. She tried not to whimper as she climbed up to the flat, but even slight movement awoke fresh aches. She needed aspirin and a hot bath, preferably filled with whiskey.
    The first sign something was amiss in the flat was quiet. The building was never quiet—the neighbors shouted, the noise from their tellys drifted down the hallway, and the small neighbor boy who was constantly in the hall conducting elaborate battles with his Transformers shrieked and made laser sounds.
    Deserted, silent except for the buzzing of the overhead lights, the hallway outside the flat looked like something out of an ancient, elegant ghost story. The stamped tin ceiling and heavy wood doors were caked with decades of grime, and the scarred wood floor creaked under Pete’s feet.
    She stopped outside her own door and splayed her fingers against the wood. The protection hex that lay over the flat like finest cobweb still hung there, undisturbed. Still, Pete couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that something was off. Never had her neighbors been so dead silent. Never had the air in the building been so still, as if lightning had just struck, or was just about to.
    Could be she was paranoid. Felix Patel certainly thought she was off her rocker.
    Could be, but she still inserted her key slowly and turned the lock soundlessly, entering the flat with her back easing up to the wall.
    Everything was just as she’d left it. Faint silver light of morning was creeping through the windows and picking out motes in the air. Pete realized her heart was hammering, and she kicked the door shut, letting the crack put the lid on that. She’d had a hard night and she was exhausted, and magic would fuck with your brain chemistry quicker than any drug. That was all.
    She slung off her jacket, which was covered in dust and road muck, kicked off her shoes, and made it a few steps into the apartment when the curse wrapped around her from foot to head, cold and unyielding as chains. She fell hard, choking, icicles of magic jabbing into her skin. After all the abuse she’d endured in the past few days, one more bruise didn’t make much of a dent. What worried her more was that she couldn’t breathe. Or more accurately, she could, inhaling ice and exhaling knives.
    The owner of the curse moved into her field of view, backlight from the window turning him into a featureless man-shape, as if he were a figure on a church window, calling up a sharp memory of mornings in mass at the Catholic school Connor had insisted she attend: kneeling in her illicit fishnets, the nylon leaving hash marks on her knees, Pete squirming against the sting while the stone floor chilled her down to the bone.
    She was blacking out. Her air was going. Her mind jumped and twitched as the curse fought with her talent, and won handily. Pete wondered almost idly as the man walked over to her and nudged her with one shined Oxford shoe, if he meant to kill her or only scare her. If it was the