Bone Gods

there, smoking a pipe that would have given Gandalf a complex, and took the free chair. “Hello, Ian.”
    Ian Mosswood raised one eyebrow, and exhaled a stream of blue-green smoke. “If it isn’t Petunia Caldecott. To what do I owe this dubious pleasure?”
    Pete rolled her eyes. “I’ve kicked men square in the business for slinging that name about, you know.”
    Mosswood gave a snort. “I’d wager you’ve kicked them for far less. You’ve a changeable temperament, Petunia. ”
    “Look,” Pete said, shoving the lager at him. “I don’t want to spend one more fucking second in this place than I must, and I’ve brought you an offering and everything, and I’m not even a druid. You don’t have to be a cunt about it.”
    Mosswood raised the glass to his lips and took a healthy sip. “No. But I do have more fun this way.”
    Pete sighed. “Tosser.”
    Ian gave a small smile, more of a lip twitch, but with a being as capricious and powerful as a Green Man, you took what you could get. “What can I do for you, oh gracious and most serene Miss Caldecott?”
    Pete pulled up the picture of Gerard Carver’s torso and slid her mobile across the table. “You ever seen anything like this?”
    Mosswood’s pleasant expression bled away, as if a downpour had stripped all the leaves from a sapling. “Where did you get this?”
    “A dead bloke in the British Museum,” Pete said. Out of the corner of her eye, one of the gits the barwoman had pointed out got up from his table and joined his partner coming out of the gents’. They were a matched pair—dour, black coats and trousers, natty black hats of a style that was several generations out of date for the world Pete had come from, but perhaps not for theirs. They moved smooth and well, used to one another and used to violence, by the curve of their fists and the stamp of their boots. Mosswood’s ale rippled as they approached. Pete weighed her chance of running and found it shite. The first move in a fight wouldn’t land her any more favorably. Staying put was the winner, then. Maybe they simply wanted to chat.
    Maybe she was Queen fucking Elizabeth.
    “You must listen to me.” Mosswood had carried on talking while she’d been distracted. “If this is what it appears to be, you must leave it—”
    Pete felt a hand descend on her shoulder, then two hands, one for each git. “Petunia Caldecott,” said the one who’d come from the gents’. “We wonder if you’d be so kind as to accompany us outside for a wee chat.”
    Pete rolled her eyes at Ian. “You see what you’ve done? Got every bastard in the place using that name.”
    “Please,” said the other. His voice was posh, but he spoke English like he was kicking the hard consonants in the gut—German, Pete guessed, or from some other place where the whole language sounded like shouting and they ate a lot of sausage.
    “This is a lovely pub,” he continued. “I would hate for blood to get all over the floors and walls. Very unsanitary.”
    Mosswood inclined his head slightly in question, but Pete answered with a shake. She didn’t need one of the oldest creatures in the Black to stand in her stead for a pair of knuckle-draggers.
    “Very,” she agreed, and stood, shrugging off Wee Chat and German Boy as she did so. They wanted her quiet and some place out of view, which didn’t bode well, but when they touched her they didn’t ping her radar as more than human, which did. Humans were low on the totem pole—breakable and fragile in all the usual ways, even with a talent behind them.
    “Out the back, if you please,” said German Boy, and he made a courtly after-you gesture that caused his long black coat to swirl.
    Pete walked ahead of them, feeling the eyes of Mosswood and the barwoman and everyone else in the pub on her. Watching to see how Jack Winter’s left-behind girlfriend handled herself. Watching to see if she showed them fear. Pete thrust her chin out and kept her face blank as she pushed through the kitchen door, past the loo and the storage closet, and out into the back alley, where it was still night and still foggy. At least out here, nobody was staring.

CHAPTER 4
    “Right,” Pete said, turning to face the twin gits as the pub door swung shut behind them. “You two from the Van Helsing fan club, or did your mums dress you like that?”
    Wee Chat’s mouth twitched. “I’m Abbot. This is Dreisden. And you, Miss Caldecott, need to come with us.”
    They wanted her to