Bone Gods

bombardment had cleared Pete’s head. She was past the point of no return—in that zone beyond exhausted where everything becomes tunnel visions and knife edges. She’d lied to the Hecate, she hadn’t delivered to Naughton, and she’d trusted the one person in the Black who could fuck her over properly the way no other could. Not to mention that Felix Patel would probably find a way to pin McCorkle’s murder and Ollie’s situation on her if he were given half a chance. If Pete were in Patel’s shoes, she’d arrest her too.
    “I’m fucked,” Pete said out loud. “Properly.”
    “Your sunny optimism never fails to gird my loins and strengthen my bloody spirit, you know,” Ollie said. “Don’t unravel on me now, Caldecott.”
    “I’ve got bloody nothing in my hand,” Pete said. “Except I either go out and murder someone in cold blood or we stay here until the Met digs up our skeletons in a few decades and we become a mystery program on Channel 1.”
    “Jesus,” Ollie said. “And there you go reassuring me.”
    “I’m sorry,” Pete sighed. She stood up and paced to each wall, just to have something to do. “I just needed to say that to someone, before I screamed some more.”
    “You know something?” Ollie said. “I hated you the first time I clapped eyes on you.”
    “Is this your idea of helpful?” Pete said. She had to get the fuck out of this freezer and find Jack. At least try to talk him out of handing Carver over, if he hadn’t already.
    “You were just some snot-nosed DC who had a famous da, clearly years too green for CID,” Ollie said. “And you remember what the first thing you said to me was when I reluctantly rolled meself over to shake your hand?”
    “ ‘You’ve got kidney pie on your shirt,’ ” Pete muttered, glad it was dark so Ollie couldn’t see her flush. She had been green, barely twenty-six and well aware that everyone in the CID room at Holborn had been staring a hole in her.
    “Too right, kidney pie,” Ollie said. “And I knew then that you were either even more of a little snot than I supposed or you had a pair of great brass ones.” He shifted in the dark. “I’m glad it was the latter, Caldecott, because you’ve kept my arse on the straight and narrow these past years, and you were a good copper, and you’re going to be all right now.” He reached out in the dark, caught her hand, and squeezed. “Now leave off your whingeing and use that cracking wit to get us out of here, will you?”
    “Survival,” Pete said, Ollie’s words sprouting a mad idea in her head. It was more than mad—it was fucking suicidal, and it was something that Jack would have smacked her into a wall for even contemplating. But it was that or kill him, and Pete’s answer to that was still the same. Couldn’t fucking do it.
    “ ’S what I said,” Ollie agreed.
    Pete dug her lighter out again and flicked it on. “Open up these boxes. I need chalk, or paint—even a marker will do. Something to draw with.”
    Ollie’s forehead crinkled, but he helped her, the rodent-chewed and broken-down cardboard coming apart in their hands. “Don’t mind my stupid question,” Ollie said, “but what d’you need to draw, anyway?”
    “A circle,” Pete told him. “There’s someone that I need to talk to.”
    She unearthed chalk and a wealth of discarded candle stubs in one of the boxes, along with bills for a band that had played Naughton’s club in 1989 and several Halloween decorations of the same vintage. Pete lit the candles, which guttered over the steel walls. “Stand back,” she told Ollie, putting the black candle at the head and the white at the foot.
    “You sure know what you’re doing?” he said, backing up to the corner of the freezer.
    “Yeah,” Pete said as she chalked a crooked ring between the candles. “I’m a bloody expert in all matters of the occult.” She didn’t know all the markings that Jack did, didn’t know the words his discipline had passed to him, but with this, all that mattered—really—was the name.
    Pete drew another circle around herself, doubling it for safety. She sat, folding her hands over her knees, and looked back at Ollie. “No matter what happens, do not cross the chalk and do not break the circle, you understand me?”
    Ollie’s eyes were wide. “Pete, what exactly is about to happen here?”
    Pete shut her eyes and tried to take a calming breath that only aggravated her rib. “Probably nothing good.”
    Jack