Bone Gods

narrowed her eyes. “And psychic visions on top of it. Aren’t you a bright lad?”
    Pete risked raising her head. Nasiri, from below, was a terror, her coffee-cream skin and wild black hair crackling like a storm cloud, while her eyes knifed directly into Pete’s. Not to mention the knife in her fist, sharp as the cold air and big as a house. “Whatever you think’s going on here, it’s not,” she said. “I’m not a necromancer.” The Nasiri of before, the skeptic, was long gone, and Pete felt monumentally idiotic for taking the act at face value.
    Nasiri flicked the knife toward her. “You and this piece of demon-chewed flesh here are going to give Carver over to the same bastards that sliced off pieces of him in the first place, to save your own arse. That about cover it?”
    “Not mine,” Pete said quietly. “Ollie Heath’s.”
    Nasiri’s stony expression twitched at that, but she tightened her fingers on the scalpel. “You’re a lying bitch.”
    “No,” Pete said carefully. “I wouldn’t be here if they were only on to me. Ollie got pulled in because of things I did.” She raised her head, and tried to sit up. Her spinning skull gave her mixed results. “He’s innocent in all of this. I’m just trying to fix what I put wrong, Nasiri. I swear.”
    “Then why are you here with this? ” Nasiri snarled, and moved the knife to Jack. Jack met her eyes, a smirk playing across his lips.
    “I know what you are now.” He raised a finger and pointed it at her like a gun. Nasiri took a step forward.
    “Don’t fucking move, either of you!”
    “Half-breed,” Jack said. “You’ve got a bit of dirty old human in your veins, don’t you?”
    “You shut your gob,” Nasiri snarled. “You know nothing about me. Your blood is just as filthy.”
    “Filthy, yeah,” Jack said. “All of us humans are filthy and wicked. Didn’t find that out, pretending to be one?”
    Nasiri’s lips peeled back and her limbs went stiff. She was going to cut Jack, and Pete made a decision. She didn’t bother trying to leap and disarm Nasiri with her hands, but lashed out with her boot, steel toe connecting with Nasiri’s knee. The joint went pop , and Nasiri crumpled, bringing her face to face with Pete.
    “ Fuck. ” Nasiri’s face was pale. “You broke my fucking knee.”
    Pete knocked the scalpel away. It rattled across the tile and came to rest under a rolling gurney holding the corpse of the skinhead Nasiri had been working on. “You all right?” Pete said to Jack.
    “I’m aces, luv,” he said. “No thanks to this crazy cunt.”
    Nasiri clutched her knee. “You’re filth on my boot. That’s right—sludge at the bottom of the Black. Sewage.”
    “Enough,” Pete told her. “I don’t care about your refined sensibilities, Nasiri. I just want Carver’s body.”
    Nasiri levered herself up with difficulty, clutching the edge of Carver’s gurney and holding her leg in a lame crook. “You really have no idea what’s going on here, do you? What these men are doing to the Black?”
    “Unrest, black magic, blah fucking blah,” Pete said. “I don’t care about that. I care about Ollie.”
    “No,” Nasiri said. She twitched the sheet back from Carver’s face. “I mean him. This poor bastard. I heard you talking to Heath in the museum. I know you don’t have a clue what happened to him to bring him back here.”
    “And you do?” Pete said, folding her arms. “I find that unlikely.”
    “Listen,” Nasiri said. “Just give me five minutes to explain. I like you, Pete. I’m trying to help you.”
    “Why should we trust a fucking word that comes out of your mouth?” Jack said, folding his arms in a mirror of Pete’s gesture.
    “Because unlike you, crow-mage”—Nasiri sniffed—“I don’t lie whenever my lips move.”
    “Fine,” Pete said, forestalling Jack with a hand from smacking Nasiri. “You have thirty seconds. Speak.”
    Nasiri reached for a mop leaning against the wall, using it as a makeshift crutch. “You didn’t have to work me over,” she told Pete. “I wasn’t going to really hurt you. I’m on your side.”
    Jack gave a laugh that echoed off the tiles, over the giant’s-breath roar of the refrigeration unit. “A thing like you, on our side?”
    “Didn’t say your side, did I?” Nasiri snapped. “On Pete’s.”
    “Oi,” Pete said. “Get on with it or I’m going to take that stick away, smack you in the skull with it, and wheel Carver out of