Bone Gods

was scarred and carved with black markings, and Pete moved more boxes and clutter. A cigar box full of gris-gris, resplendent with beads and feathers, bounced off her foot and scattered its contents across the boards.
    “Shit,” Pete muttered. The markings were clear now. They weren’t the harsh symbols that covered Gerard Carver, but they weren’t pleasant to stare at either. Pete couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen the swooping marks and lettering somewhere before. They matched a silver-tongued language, one that humans in the Black steered well clear of.
    “It’s Fae.” Irina came out of the back room holding a bell jar, within which rested soil and a tangle of green stems topped by one perfect silver flower.
    “Is it?” Pete said. Of course. She’d read in one of Jack’s books that Fae language was never spoken aloud by men, in hopes of avoiding the sort of curse that got you a donkey’s head or napping for a hundred years.
    “If you’re looking for Fae orchids, you knew that already,” Irina said.
    “I’ve seen it before,” Pete admitted. “Not quite this much. What is it?”
    “You ask a lot of bloody questions,” Irina fussed. “You a cop?”
    “Used to be,” Pete said. “Now, I just want to take my silly plant and go.”
    Irina went to a set of apothecary drawers behind the shop counter and gestured her over. “You sure you know what you’re about, tripping on this shit, little woman? You really think you can swim back out of whatever dark cave it is you’re diving into, when you’re done?”
    Pete spread her hands. “What I do with it is my business.”
    “And I suppose you being tangled up with Jack Winter hasn’t got any bearing on you wanting this little darling whatsoever,” Irina said. It was casual, but there was bite behind the words. She drew out a baggie, the sort expensive markets kept out for measuring spices into, and a pair of delicate surgical scissors with tips like silver fangs.
    “Jack is also my business,” Pete said. She knew it was bad form to smack an old woman, but she had a feeling perhaps this time she’d get a pass.
    “I am indentured to a Fae,” Irina said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I traffic their plants and whatever else they care to have humans imbibe, and in return they protect the shop and its neutral ground for anything nasty. Really, a very snug arrangement. I wish I’d had it when I was a girl living in Dolgoprudny. The monsters there were men, but monsters all the same.”
    “This is fascinating,” Pete said, “really, but I’m in a bit of a rush.”
    Irina handed her a pair of sound-dampening earphones, the sort you’d wear to stand by a jet engine. “The song can drive you insane,” she said. “If you’re not someone it knows.”
    “It knows us?” Pete looked suspiciously at the orchid under the bell jar.
    “Knows me,” Irina said. Pete clamped the apparatus around her ears and watched Irina coo as she lifted the jar off. Pete didn’t hear anything, just the beat of her heart, but she smelled the scent, far too sweet with an undertone of something rotten. She could choke on it, as Irina stroked the stamens of the orchid, lips moving, almost as if she were distracting the thing before she put the scissors against the stem and lopped the flower neatly off.
    She waved at Pete, and Pete removed the headgear. She was glad to see Irina package the flower with the acumen of a chemist, taping it shut and cutting off the scent before Pete passed out. “There,” she said. “I’ll even give you the police discount.”
    “How kind,” Pete said, as Irina accepted her wad of notes and rooted below the counter for change.
    “Not really,” she said. Pete watched her rise with a pistol in her petite, knotty fist.
    Pete lifted her hands slowly, so that Irina wouldn’t get the wrong idea. “Something I said?”
    “If you think,” Irina gritted, “that I’m letting you walk out of here and give the crow-mage the power to walk between worlds, then you’re sorely fucking mistaken, miss.”
    “You’ve got the wrong idea,” Pete said quietly. “Jack isn’t the one…”
    “Winter is an obscenity,” said Irina. “A whore of the blood gods that would tear the Black to shreds and suck the marrow from its bones. I might serve the Fae but I would never serve them, and never allow him the power this holds.”
    Pete had always been crap at negotiations. The whole diffuse the situation,