Bone Gods

CHAPTER 1

The dead man lay in repose at the feet of Ramses II. His blood had dried long ago on the marble floor and left a rust-colored halo about his head. One of the dead man’s hands stretched outward, his fingers curled like an oak leaf in the dead of winter.

Pete Caldecott watched the dead man from the doorway of the Egyptian Room. Early morning light lit the white-suited crime scene investigators and the somber blue-jacketed Metropolitan Police officers like a cluster of ghosts, even though every one of them was flesh and bone.

Involved in watching as she was, she jumped when a hand touched her arm. “Got you a tea,” Ollie Heath said, passing over a cardboard cup. “Not that shite stuff we have down at the nick, either—posh British Museum tea.” He swigged from his own paper cup, a bit of brown liquid dribbling out to land on his shirt.

“Cheers.” Pete took a sip, noting in passing that the tea was, in fact, quite good. “What’s all this, Ollie? Your boys can’t handle a bit of straightforward murder amidst the mummies?”

Ollie grimaced at the tea on his shirt. “Call came in at about five a.m.—body in the British Museum. Thought it was some kids taking the piss at first. ’S like something out of bloody Agatha Christie, right? Anyway, they kicked it to the DI in the rotation, I got the crime scene boys in for a look, and it was all going along fine until the medical examiner went to move the body.” Ollie stopped talking, and Pete watched his usually flushed cheeks drain to pale. “She found, well…” He cleared his throat. “You need to see it for yourself.”

Pete handed Ollie her teacup and ducked under the tape blocking off the Egyptian collection. It was eight in the morning, nearly. The museum would be wanting to open in a scant few hours, and Ollie’s boys had been doing a fine job of getting things cleared away from view of gawking tourists, screeching schoolkids, and the odd homeless bloke until something had spooked them.

She accepted a pair of gloves and paper booties from the plod manning the tape as she considered that. Ollie was, outward appearance and broad Yorkshire brogue not withstanding, a good copper with a dozen years in the Met, half of those manning a desk in a Murder Investigation Team. He’d seen the worst people had to offer, all of the various permutations and perversions of death they could dream up. Pete didn’t really want to know what could shake Ollie Heath so much he was hanging back like a first-year probie.

But since he’d called her, it was a fair bet that whatever had shaken Ollie and his team wasn’t any of the usual murder, rape, and torture police counted as routine. If it were murder, rape, or torture of the garden variety, Pete would still be asleep. Murder of the freakish, occult variety—that would make Ollie pick up the phone.

Pete intercepted the medical examiner a few feet from the body. The woman was a new face since Pete had chucked her DI desk at the Met for the freaks, the occult, and the walking movie monsters, and she looked Pete up and down with an unreadable expression.

“Hello,” Pete offered, along with her hand. “Ollie might have told you he asked me to have a look. I’m Pete Caldecott.” The last thing she wanted to do was go treading on toes and starting gossip all over again about the crazy ex-DI who’d taken up with that crazy shite some New Age gits and mumbling schizophrenics called magic.

Which was all true, except for the part about it being shite. It wasn’t, at least not completely. But Pete found that accepting that magic existed, that it was threaded all through their city as surely as roads and rivers and rail track, was the sort of hill most people weren’t willing to hoof over.

“Of course.” The medical examiner shook Pete’s hand. “Dr. Annika Nasiri. Heath told me you might have some insight into the … condition … of the body.”

“Might,” Pete said. “Can’t say until I see it.”

Nasiri stepped aside. “Heard you used to be a detective. I trust that you know enough not to contaminate my evidence?”

“I’ll try and hold back from smearing DNA all over him,” Pete said, kneeling next to the dead man. She made a mental inventory of the victim, as if she were still a cop—white male, early forties at a glance, a little ginger hair up top and a lot on his chin, cultivated the sort of beard favored by adjunct professors and kiddie fiddlers. No injures apparent, aside from the gaping second smile in his throat, of course, and the blood pool under him, nearly as wide as Pete was tall, seeping into the base of the Ramses bust that glowered above her like an irritable graven image.

“You have a guess as to what they cut his throat with?” Pete asked Nasiri, out of habit. Perhaps she’d get lucky, and it would be as simple as a jealous colleague or a spat over a girl, or a boy. Nothing that needed a person familiar with sacrifice and ritual killing to pin the slit throat and the peculiar placement of the corpse as such.

The doctor consulted her tablet PC, screen covered in handwritten notes around an electronic diagram of a body, with the wounds picked out as shaded portions. “Some kind of single-edge blade, long and thin,” she said. “Until I’ve made examination of the wound in my lab I can’t be more specific, I’m afraid.”

“Right then,” Pete said, deciding that if Nasiri wasn’t going to be forward, she would. “What’s spooked you so much you won’t come within three feet of the dearly departed?”

“When my crew started to move the body, one of them lost their grip,” Nasiri said. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and her voice constricted down to just above a whisper. “The victim’s shirt slipped open.”

Pete leaned over and tugged aside the collar of the dead man’s cotton Oxford. Her breath hitched in her throat. When she saw his flesh, she understood why Ollie had called.

Cuts covered the dead man’s torso, slices and slashes so precise and intricate they’d make Jack the Ripper weep happy tears. Lines and loops and circles, deep and shallow, cuts over cuts over scar tissue, inflicted over years. Newer wounds had been cauterized, the skin around them black with infection. The older scars grew together, twined like white, shiny vines in a fleshy garden.

The scarring and cutting interlocked to form symbols that had no heads and no tails, but were a continuous pattern over every centimeter of visible skin. They traveled from just under the dead man’s collar, down his chest, and over his stomach, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. They were nothing familiar to Pete, which was troubling in and of itself. Magical symbolism worked as a kind of shorthand, across all the various disciplines and religions contained within—a pentagram could be co-opted by hairy-legged hippies, true, but it was also shorthand for a white witch, to tell things from the nasty side of magic to step the fuck off.

These symbols were practiced and deliberate, and Pete couldn’t make sense of them, except that they made her head hurt, deep down near the base of her skull. The power in the dead man’s skin vibrated her back teeth, the power that the carvings gave off nearly palpable, like the stench of decay would be in a few more hours. No wonder Ollie and Dr. Nasiri were giving him a wide berth. You didn’t need a talent to sense when something unnatural and rotten was in your psychic space. It was a simple human survival mechanism, to recognize the Other, and run from it fast as your two feet would take you.

Ollie’s voice made Pete start, heart slamming against her rib bones before it began hammering again. “Well?”

Pete pulled the dead man’s shirt open fully, exposing the spreading ruin of scar tissue, down both his arms and peeking out from his cuffs as well. “I think it’s good you called me.”

CHAPTER 2

Ollie took Pete outside, to get a breath of air he said, but Pete knew the real reason and she was just as glad to leave the oppressive web of black magic around the body as Ollie’s subconscious was.

They stood on the steps of the British Museum, its long gravel lawn and the iron gates holding back the world, which passed beyond them without a care or a notion of what had taken place behind the museum’s granite edifice.

Pete took her pack of cigarettes from her bag and lit up, waiting for Ollie to speak first so she could gauge his mood.

“So,” he sighed after she’d taken a few drags. “We’re in the shit with this one, aren’t we?”

“Just a bit,” Pete agreed, flicking ash onto the museum’s steps.

“What, then?” Ollie said. “If it’s cults or a serial bloke taking orders from the neighborhood Alsatian, I’d like to know now before the press come howling over my threshold.”

Pete sucked on her Parliament to buy her a few seconds, but it didn’t change the answer. “It’s black magic, and fucking strong stuff. I could feel it all the way across the room. Beyond that…” She watched the smoke dissipate into the bright morning air. “I don’t know, Ollie. I’ve never run into anything like this before.”

“You can’t, I dunno…” Ollie gestured in a vague circle. “Read the scene? Sense the vibrations of the ether or summat?”

Pete sighed. “Maybe if I were a bloody TV psychic, Ollie. I’ve told you, it doesn’t work that way for me.” It being a talent, and Pete’s talent being even less use than a fake medium’s in situations like the one inside. Murder wasn’t something she could conjure an answer to, besides feeling the black magic seeping out of the museum even now, laying cold bony fingers on the back of her neck.

Ollie waved her smoke away from his face and fidgeted, the next bit not coming to him easily. “You think you could get your Jack to take a look? I’ve seen him do all the mumbo-jumbo stuff.” He squinted at Pete. “You two didn’t split up, did you?”

Pete dropped her fag-end to the granite steps, grinding it under her toe. Ollie was just fishing for a reaction. She was careful not to give him one. “No. Jack’s not about anymore.”

“Oh,” Ollie said, sounding almost disappointed. “Well then,” he continued, after a moment where Pete watched a valiant struggle not to ask for gory details play out in his florid face, “anything else you can give me about the dead bloke? Preferably something I can use to put a squeeze on whoever did him a bad turn?”

Pete breathed in, out, clearing her lungs of smoke and her mind of the tight squeeze of emotions that Jack’s name conjured up. As if she’d called his ghost into being, she swore she could hear his raspy laughter from just behind the next pillar, smell his scent of leather and stale tobacco and soap and whiskey, see a curl of blue across the air, the visible tinge of the magic that followed Jack everywhere he went.…

But she couldn’t see it, not really. Because Jack was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.

“Pete,” Ollie said. “Hullo. Come back. I could use the assist. Hasn’t been a banner year for clearing cases, since me brilliant lady partner shoved off for the private sector.”

Pete rubbed a hand down the side of her face. She couldn’t speak to the dead or even know by sight and sense what kind of spell she’d stumbled onto, but she could at least act like she had a brain in her head. “Give me his particulars. Maybe I can scare up his contacts or at least tell you what his poison was, sorcery-wise.” She didn’t have much in the way of a useful talent, but she could at least talk to the people who did, which was more than Ollie would get. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get his heart pulled out, or at the very least his head stove in.

Ollie consulted his PDA, a blipping, annoying little device that Pete had always thought he put entirely too much stock in. “According to the museum’s human resources, the name’s Gerard Carver, he was an assistant curator of the Egyptian Collection, an excellent worker according to his boss (a Mr. Something-Egyptian-with-Ten-Thousand-Syllables), diploma from London City College, nary an enemy in the world as far as the museum was concerned.” He scrolled through the notes. “Lives with his mum in Knightsbridge. Ah, shite, I’m going to have to be going there next.” Ollie closed his eyes and sighed. Pete had all sympathy—telling someone their son was dead wasn’t a task anyone should have to do with regularity.

“I’ll find out,” Pete said. “I’ll need to get a few pictures of the marks. That all right?”

Ollie grimaced. “Officially, no, but go and be quick about it. Newell could have me out on my arse if he even knew you were here.”

Pete nodded her thanks. Nigel Newell, her old DCI, was about as stolid and unimaginative an officer as any Channel Four procedural could have thought up. His last words to Pete before she’d left the Met had been How disappointing you’ve let your imagination run away with you. Not having to contend with Newell every day was one of the few upsides that Pete had found in quitting.

Before she could express her thoughts about what exactly Newell could do to himself if he found out Ollie had called her, a blond man came across the lawn, waving and shouting something Pete couldn’t make out. She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Who the fuck’s that?”

Ollie sighed. “Frederick McCorkle. New partner,” he explained. “Useless as an armless lesbian with a box of dildos, that one. Freddy!” he bellowed, waving at the man. “You’re bloody late!”

He descended the steps to berate McCorkle further, leaving Pete by herself.

She turned away and went back into the museum, across the broad modern lobby, past the glass case holding the Rosetta Stone, past the winged Assyrian statues arranged as they had been in their birthplace, as gates into a stranger world. It shouldn’t sting that Ollie had finally gotten around to being assigned a new partner. She’d been gone from the Met for over a year. If she was going to come back, she’d be back. Ollie should be moved on, and the only sorrow she should feel was that Newell had saddled him with some baby-faced detective constable, still dazzled at the thought of being in plainclothes.

She walked past the smaller pharaohs—at least in relation to Ramses—and back to poor Gerard Carver’s corpse. Whatever his proclivities in life, bleeding out on a cold floor was a hard end for anyone. But it wasn’t as if he’d been a victim chosen out of a hat. Jack had at least taught her that the innocent and pure rarely got swept up in the undertow of black magic completely without their accord. People turned to sorcery for lots of reasons, most of them utterly mundane, and those people usually ended up exactly like Carver, plus or minus a few stab wounds.

Magic wasn’t really so different from everyday life. People were petty, selfish, spiteful bastards no matter what side of the river you walked on. Pete took her mobile from her bag, tapped over to the camera screen, snapped a clear shot of Carver’s exposed torso. She shoved the phone back into her bag before Nasiri caught her.

Again, this close to the corpse, she felt the vibration in the air, the spells that the symbols on Carver’s body had woven when he was alive lingering as if a cluster of spectral flies still hovered above the dead man’s carcass.

Jack would have known exactly what type of spell Carver’s murderer had woven around him. He could see the fabric of spells, as clearly as Pete could see the dead man himself. Jack could have told Ollie what breed of sorcerer had cast the abominable thing, and likely what sort of biscuits he fancied and what pub you could find the bastard in. Jack had a sight that most people never opened their eyes to, least of all those with a talent as prodigious as his. Being magically and psychically inclined left you with roughly the same brain chemistry as a schizophrenic enjoying the world’s most realistic acid trip. Jack kept himself together better than most, but seeing everything was far more than anyone could accept. There had been the drugs, the year-long blackouts, the suicide attempts, and the associated symptoms any normal person would tell Pete she was well rid of.

She couldn’t argue, and she couldn’t force herself to see things her mind simply wouldn’t wrap around the same way Jack’s did. She could only observe, and record, and try to solve her side of the mystery the old-fashioned way, with skills she’d learned at the Yard rather than from her talent.

Her talent didn’t lend itself to exposing black magic, to fighting monsters and seeing ghosts. She was only a vessel for talent far greater than her own, like a transformer on a wire.

She backed away as the medical examiner’s team, fortified against the markings on Carver now that Pete had gotten close and not burst into flame, laid down a body bag next to the dead man and prepared to roll him into it. Pete was done with Carver, and done with the knocking of his mutilated corpse against her psychic senses. She needed to be outside, away from the site of Carver’s murder and the older, darker magic of the artifacts at rest around her. It was warm and amber, scented like honey, seductive as a warm pool of water that invited her to slip under and forget.…

Pete nearly knocked into a uniformed plod before she managed to exit the museum by the service entrance, where her red Mini Cooper was parked behind a phalanx of Met vehicles, Ollie’s nondescript Vauxhall, and Nasiri’s van.

She got in and turned the arthritic engine over—the car was older than she by an order of a decade. Her mum had left it behind when she’d done a runner, and Pete had been driving it since she’d convinced her da, DI Caldecott the elder, she was to be trusted with the keys. Mistakenly, of course—she’d used it to go tooling around country roads during weekends at university, and still had a sheaf of speeding tickets from local police she’d never told him about.

Too late now. Connor Caldecott was in the ground, just like Gerard Carver shortly would be. Just like …

Pete shut the engine off again and closed her eyes. She couldn’t cry here. Not where the uniforms, Ollie, even that bloody scrubbed-faced McCorkle could see.

Her tears didn’t care, and they still squeezed down her face. Pete had never believed that crying did a bit of good other than to waste time and give her bags under her eyes, but lately the tears had simply come, like blood comes when you slice skin with a blade.

Being on a consulting job, with magic flowing close to the surface in a way that it hadn’t in months, not since Jack had disappeared, was too hard. She should have been smart enough to realize she wasn’t ready for the feeling. Should have waited, until his disappearance was less raw.…

Except he didn’t disappear, did he? Didn’t pop out for fags and not come back. You know exactly where he went. Jack was gone, but it wasn’t as if he’d slipped away in the middle of the night.

And she had to stop expecting him to appear and solve every problem, furnish every solution she didn’t have herself, work over every job that she couldn’t finish on her own. She’d thrown herself into this shadow-life, where magic was real and you saw waking nightmares every day. She’d made the choice. With or without Jack, it was done.

She had to stop looking for him, and she had to stop seeing him. Had to get a grip on herself and make the empty spots inside stop stinging whenever she saw a familiar silhouette or heard the broad tone of a Manchester accent.

Had to face the truth.

She couldn’t go to him when things got too hard.

Because Jack was in Hell, and he wasn’t coming back.

CHAPTER 3

People who didn’t feel and taste the ley lines of power running through it didn’t realize London was a city of tides. The Thames Estuary swept seawater in and out, back and forth along the embankments and bridge pilings and bricked-over, secret places beneath the city. Underground rivers trickled through ancient waterways, and Joseph Bazalgette’s Victorian marvel of modern sewage still crawled underfoot, sharing space with everything from medieval crypts to secret Cabinet rooms and bomb shelters from the Great War.

Beneath everything, the Black rose and fell the same way, ebbed and flowed against Pete’s mind while she drove east, the current of life force as old as the first bricks the Romans had laid down in the city walls. Older. Older than brick, older than blood spilled upon this patch of ground just inland where the Thames finally turned calm. Old as earth.

But not of it.

At the places of low tide, the Black and the waking world sometimes intersected, creating spots where if you turned your head just right you’d swear you saw a thin alley, an iron gate, or a shadowed doorway out of the corner of your eye, a thing that vanished when you looked straight on.

Jack had showed Pete that such places existed, but he hadn’t been particularly strict as to how one found them. She’d spent a memorable three hours wandering up and down Covent Garden in the rain, trying to find the break she knew was there. Magic vibrated on a frequency just like sight or heat or sound; it just wasn’t a station most human receivers could tune in. Pete had heard all of the theories: magic was just another notch on the spectrum, beyond infrared and under ultraviolet. Ghosts were just electrons. Demons were just quantum disturbances that molded themselves into flesh.

That was where it fell down for her. Demons were real. She’d met a demon in its borrowed flesh and stood close enough to feel his hot, sour breath on her face.

She’d looked the demon in the eye before he’d taken Jack’s soul, ripped it free of his body, and crawled with it in his teeth, straight back to Hell.

She found parking in Limehouse, and reluctantly left the Mini. Nobody drove in the city if they could help it, but Pete enjoyed it, being encapsulated in her own small world, with only shifting gears and red lights to mind, at least until she got where she was going.

The thin space called, even if she would have rather kept driving, straight out of London, onto the M-25, east until she got to the edge of the country at Dover. The Black couldn’t be left behind, though. It simply was, and once you’d seen it, you couldn’t look away.

Pete stepped into a gap between a newsagent’s and a pizza shop, and emerged into a Victorian street. In London, mid-morning approached, but here there was soft, fog-draped night. Gaslamps lit the way to the red door of a pub, through which drifted music and the occasional bout of laughter that dopplered from the brick row houses across the cobbles and back to her.

A black carriage thundered past, four horses with steam for breath and glowing red coals for eyes towing it on clockwork legs. The citizens of the carriage hid behind a red curtain, but Pete tasted black smoke on the back of her tongue as it passed, the taste of sorcery. She flipped the retreating end of the carriage the bird. Hadn’t she had enough of fucking black magic for one day?

Once it was out of sight, she pushed through the red door and into the Lament pub, the one spot she could reliably locate when crossing. Time and place worked differently in the Black, and in many ways the whole of hidden London was as the East End under Victoria—dangerous, violent, and full of things that would gut you from stomach to neck for a shilling, or simply because they were hungry.

Except at the Lament. It was neutral ground. No fighting, no gambling, and no magic. Anyone who violated the rules found themselves promptly tossed arse over teakettle into the street by a brigade of immovable bouncers, who ranged from Takeshi the former karate champion to Dougie the bridge troll.

Dougie was on tonight, and Pete smiled at him. Dougie had lived under London Bridge until the early 1700s, when increasingly wheeled methods of transport made his habit of snatching livestock, stray cats, and wandering children and ingesting them somewhat impractical.

“Oi,” he said to her, in a voice that was both high and soothing, for a towering, rock-skinned, web-fingered carnivore. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Pete tried to return the troll’s smile. It wasn’t Dougie’s fault that she could barely stand to come here without Jack. “ ’M looking for the Green Knight,” she said. “Is he here?”

“Came in about an hour ago,” Dougie grunted. “Champion mood, as usual.”

“Wonderful,” Pete muttered. She hung her jacket on a hook, because the Lament was always warm and close, and because she didn’t want the punters getting the idea that she had something to hide, and went to the bar. “Newcastle,” she sighed. “And could I talk you out of a glass of water?”

“Sure, luv,” said the bartender. She was tall, steel eyed, golden haired, and tattooed within an inch of her life. Valkyrie, Pete guessed. Or just a very, very fit former table dancer.

“Business not so great in Valhalla, then?” Pete said. She lit a cigarette while the publican poured out the ale.

“Your jokes need work,” said the barwoman. “Or maybe a defibrillator.” She set the Newcastle on the bar and leaned in to Pete, resting on her elbow. “Fair warning, Weir. I know who you are, and so did the gents who came in looking for you about half an hour ago.”

Pete kept her expression blandly pleasant while she digested the information. She knew the Black at large gossiped about her—she’d be shocked if they didn’t, really. She’d gossip about her, were she someone else. Pete Caldecott, Weir. The speaker for the old gods, one of the few of her kind still in existence. Jack Winter’s woman, who could transform his not inconsiderable power into something that could turn the Black into ashes. Still, she didn’t know that she’d ever get used to being openly stared at and recognized while she was buying a drink.

“They still about?” was all she decided to say. She felt the acute lightness of her belt, which used to hold pepper spray, a flexible baton, and sometimes a 9mm pistol. Right then she missed the pistol most of all.

“One went to the loo,” the bartender said. “One’s at the corner table, drinking coffee and taking up space.” She sneered. “Won’t even order a real bloody drink.”

“I’m not here to start trouble,” Pete said.

“They are,” said the bartender. “I know nasty gits when I put eyes on them.”

“Thanks,” Pete said. “But I didn’t come here for the nasty gits, even if they came here for me.” She took the Newcastle and made her way to a round table in the center of the pub. She set the pint in front of the bearded man in a soft, dingy tweed jacket sitting 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 go somewhere, preferably in one piece. Things were looking positively sunny. Pete shook her head to Abbot’s request. “I don’t think so. You’ve got something to tell me, you can do it now or not at all, because I’ve had my quota of shadowy errands for the day.”

Abbot sneered. “I wasn’t offering you a choice, miss.” He pulled aside his coat to showcase a truly impressive knife sheathed on his belt. Abbot made his point by pulling it an inch out of its leather casing, the pure liquid gleam of the silver blade catching the low light. Pete had seen knives like that before—silver over a cold iron core, repellent to Fae and to most other things roaming the Black that would require a stab in the first place. Jack’s old flick knife had been similar, if a fuck of a lot subtler.

She called up Jack’s face in response to Abbot’s show, in her mind’s eye, his sneer and his screen of contempt that let the rest of the world bounce off. Hoping her expression at least managed to be unimpressed, she shrugged. “I guess you don’t care if everyone and their mum knows you’re compensating, then?”

Abbot pulled the full length of the blade. It was wickedly sharp, curved at the end to more effectively hook on to flesh and organs, and wrought all over with thread-fine engraving that danced and swirled under Pete’s gaze before settling.

Whoever they were, the Git Brothers knew their way around spellcraft, and that negated all the positives Pete could find to her situation. Nobody was going to stop Abbot from using her as a replacement sheath for his great pigsticker, if he took the notion into his head. Nobody but her.

“Look,” she said, trying one last time to do as Jack would have done and talk her way free. “I’m sure you’ve got me wrong. I don’t have anything you want, and if I do, I’m sure we can work it so no one ends up in hospital.”

“Oh no, Miss Caldecott,” said Dreisden, as Abbot advanced, waving the knife like he was a small boy who’d just discovered his own penis, “we know exactly who you are, Weir. Whore of the crow-mage.”

Fuck. They did know who she was. And didn’t seem very happy about it.

“As to your condition, orders are to deliver you alive,” piped up Abbot. “Beyond that, we have no further instructions.”

So much for silver tongues. Pete managed half a heartbeat before Abbot lunged at her. He grabbed the front of her blouse and shoved her against the wall of the pub. Pete felt buttons give way.

“There you are. There’s a good girl.” The knife stroked the side of her cheek, perilously close to her ear. “Don’t scream,” Abbot hissed. “Be sweet to me and I’ll be sweet to you.”

He trailed off when Pete grabbed the hand holding her shirt and bent it backward, applying pressure to the wrist and the heel of the hand with her thumb and forefingers. She’d found the threat of a broken wrist at least made men, no matter how large, drunk, or enraged, reconsider whatever they were holding on to. Winning a fight wasn’t about being big. It was about being mean, and Pete had no doubt that when it came to her bad day versus the Git Brothers, she cornered the market on meanness.

Abbot let go of her as Pete forced him loose. For good measure and perhaps a bit, she admitted, from spite, she put a knee into his bollocks. Abbot collapsed, and Pete kicked his knife out of reach before she turned on Dreisden. He was faster and less interested in her tits, and silver and iron appeared in his hand without missing a step. This time it was a straight razor with an ebony handle, more of the liquid spellcraft wrought into it. Dreisden clearly knew this dance, and he came in with a backhand slash that would have opened Pete from crotch to neck if she’d been any slower.

She was small, had always been the smallest in any given class or training during her Met days, and she used her size to duck inside Dreisden’s reach, safe from the razor, pushing her arm into his elbow joint to break his stance and throw him off balance. Pete hit Dreisden one sharp, short punch just under his sternum with her other hand, angling her fist up, and he let out a wheeze like she’d stepped on him.

She jabbed him once more in the hollow of his throat, and that was that. Dreisden fell to his knees, dropping the razor to attend to the pressing matter of not breathing. He looked up at Pete with bulging, accusing eyes as his mouth flapped like a trout’s.

“Oh, calm down,” she sighed. “You’ll live.”

Dreiden swiped at her with one hand, and Pete jumped back, out of reach. She raised her boot to put it into Dreisden’s skull and convince him to stay down. Too late she felt the wind of movement on her back, and something cold and round and utterly too familiar press against the back of her neck.

A voice like carriage wheels scraping over cobbles said, “That’s enough out of you, miss.”

Pete stilled, putting her foot down and keeping her hands at her side.

“Good girl,” the voice told her. To Abbot and Dreisden it snarled, “Get up!”

The pair got to their feet, Abbot standing bowlegged and wincing when he moved. “You didn’t tell us she’s some kind of fucking kung fu master, did you?” he mumbled.

“Shut it,” the voice ordered. “A tiny little thing like her taking out the pair of you—you’re a waste of my fucking air. Go back to the car.”

The owner of the pistol grabbed Pete by the shoulder and turned her around. “I suppose you find this all very funny, Miss Caldecott.”

Pete took in the new addition to the Git Family, and felt her stomach drop a bit. He had gray hair and matching gray eyes, two bits of polished steel. A face that wasn’t quite craggy enough to be carved from stone, but would definitely put a fright into small children. Huge—not wide but rangy, his hand more than big enough to envelope the grip of the pistol with acres left over.

“It was a bit,” she admitted, since with a gun in her face, her policy was generally the truth. “When I kneed him in the bollocks and his voice went all wobbly.”

“Bitch,” Abbot spat. “I should’ve cut you.”

“Could’ve, should’ve,” Pete snapped back. “Didn’t.”

“Car!” the man with the pistol bellowed. “Now!”

Abbot took his leave, grumbling invective that Pete was sure had to do with her heritage and proclivities. The git in charge stepped back, keeping the pistol pointed at her skull. “You going to give me any more trouble, girl?”

“Depends.” Pete folded her arms. “You going to keep calling me pet names and trying to kidnap me out of pubs?”

“You’re a lot of things, Miss Caldecott.” The git in charge grinned. His teeth were very white and straight, like a row of standing stones. “But I don’t think you’re bulletproof.”

“Look, who the fuck are you lot?” Pete demanded. “I was having a nice, quiet drink with a mate. You interrupted me, and you’re rude. I don’t see why I should listen another word you say.”

The git lowered his pistol—it was a .45, Pete noted, with a nickle barrel and an ivory grip, both etched as his flunkie’s blades were. A small cross in ebony was inlaid into the butt of the grip and it gleamed as the man put his weapon, carefully and lovingly, into a shoulder holster secreted under his black coat. “You’re right, I was rude. Forgive me.” He extended a hand in place of his pistol, encased in a black leather glove tight enough to be second skin. “My name is Ethan Morningstar. And I do need to speak with you, Miss Caldecott.”

“Was that so hard?” Pete asked him. She felt she had a right to be peeved with the man. He’d had her dragged from a pub and nearly stabbed. “Why all of this needless crap with your hard men, Mr. Morningstar? Just talk.”

“You’ll excuse my men,” said Ethan. “You have a certain … reputation for combativeness. My men were simply to ensure that the conversation remained civil. Their purpose was not to be lewd and lascivious, I assure you. Mr. Abbot will be disciplined.” The way he said it made the small hairs on Pete’s neck, the ones fine-tuned by years of Catholic schooling, bristle. Morningstar was hard like an old school East End gangster was hard—imposing, expressionless, and possessing roughly the same empathy as a tombstone. Abbot was a cunt and an idiot, but Pete didn’t envy the remainder of his night.

“Maybe he’s had enough,” she suggested. “A boot to the nethers isn’t something most gents forget with any speed.”

Morningstar gave a humorless twitch of his mouth. “You are the expert in emasculation, I suppose.” He gestured to a black BMW idling at the end of the alley. “Now, will you come with us of your own accord?”

Pete considered. It was rare enough to see cars in the Black, still rarer to see modern ones in good working order. Things with complex circuits and chipsets tended to get fouled up by the crossing over from regular London to the Black beneath—a fundamental shift in physics sent most post-1970s tech into fits. To be driving what looked like the newest in bulletproof, leather-interiored luxury, Morningstar must have some powerful enchantments backing him up. All that and a gun as well. Pete decided either it was her bloody lucky day, or the gods were taking the piss. Most likely the latter.

“No,” Pete said to Morningstar. “I don’t think I will. You can tell me here or not at all.”

Morningstar sighed, as if she were a child refusing to eat her breakfast. “Very well. I’d hoped a show of civility might convince you where force wouldn’t, but I can see I’m to resort to shock and awe.”

He snapped his fingers in the direction of the car and the back door swung open. A petite gray-haired woman stepped out, her lithe small form and heart-shaped face older and thinner but still undeniably familiar to Pete as the features slowly lined up to fall over a memory, like a tracing over an original.

Gold. The hair had been gold, when she’d gone away. The shade that neither Pete nor her older sister MG had inherited, thanks to Connor’s black Irish genes.

Pete felt her lips part, letting all her air out save for what it took to say a word. “Mum?”

CHAPTER 5

Juniper Caldecott came over and stroked her palm against Pete’s cheek once, then tucked a stray hair behind Pete’s ear. “Hello again, Petunia.”

Pete shut her mouth with effort, and thought it was frankly a miracle that she managed not to simply scream. “Mum, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Morningstar’s eyebrows peaked. “I’ll thank you to not use that language in front of your mother.”

“I’ll thank you to kindly fuck off back to your fancy-dress party, you gun-toting twat,” Pete snapped, not taking her attention from Juniper. “Mum, what the Hell is going on? I haven’t … we haven’t seen you in bloody years.”

“It was too long,” Juniper agreed. “And I’m sure you have questions.”

“Oh yeah,” Pete agreed. “Questions, I have those. Just for instance, why’d you run out when I was eleven, never so much as pick up the phone, and let me and Da and MG think you were most likely dead for almost twenty fucking years?”

“Language!” Morningstar shouted, his coat flapping as if he were a bird and she’d chucked a stone at him. Pete turned on a glare on him.

“One more word and I’m going to feed you that hat of yours.”

“I don’t expect you to forgive me at once,” Juniper said to Pete, “but do you think you could at least listen to me?”

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about,” Pete told her. Now that she’d stopped feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach, the things she’d imagined saying to her mother over and over seemed useless. Even the rage she’d expected was curiously void. Juniper was simply there, older like a piece of furniture that didn’t fit in with the rest of the room. Juniper tried to reach for her and Pete backed out of range. She felt stiff, as if she were locked up behind her own eyes, watching someone else react as Juniper pleaded with her.

She could remember the suitcase Juniper had packed on the Saturday she lit out. It had hard plastic sides, robin’s egg blue with a white handle. MG had cried. Pete hadn’t. Connor had sat on the sofa, rolling a glass of whiskey between his hands, watching an Ireland-Scotland match on the telly.

Sometimes you just have to let go, Connor, she’d said with her hand on the front door of their flat.

And, I have let fucking go, haven’t I? he’d snarled, and reached out to twist the volume on the set to maximum.

That was the last time Pete, MG, and their father had seen Juniper. Pete couldn’t even find her through the Met’s database to get in touch when Connor went into the hospital for pneumonia and didn’t come out again, the lung carcinoma fed by thirty years of smoking like the copper he was eating him up in a little over six months’ time.

“I got into a bad way with some bad people,” Juniper said. “They wouldn’t let me contact anyone. I had to get a new identity to get away. Ethan helped me with that. He’s the one who got me free.”

“So what?” Pete said acidly. “Ethan here doesn’t believe in the telephone? He prefers family reunions in dank alleys?”

“I asked your mother along tonight because we all have something to say to you,” Ethan said. “And I thought it would be easier to hear coming from someone who cares for you deeply.”

“We?” Pete asked. “What we is under discussion, exactly? The Beatles? The Queen? The twats-in-coats collective?” She left the part about Juniper caring deeply for her alone. Morningstar was clearly delusional.

“We meaning the Order of the Malleus, Miss Caldecott,” Morningstar said. “At this point, our interests converge, which brings you an opportunity to cease throwing your life away on sorcery.”

Pete tried not to gawp stupidly for the second time that night. Along with her mother, the Order of the Malleus was a thing she’d thought purely theoretical, and probably gone for good, up until the moment. Non-magicians in the Black, crusaders for a set of ideals that had gone out of fashion with shoe buckles, the Order was something mages used to spook one another, any time somebody with a talent disappeared or died in a way that wasn’t immediately explained. The Order got ’im was the Black’s ’S true, my mum’s cousin’s boyfriend’s seen Bigfoot and shaken his hand.

In other words, utter shit.

“You’re pulling my fucking leg,” she told Morningstar. His brows drew together.

“I assure you, Petunia, I am taking this matter with grave seriousness, even if you are not.” He straightened his coat and hat, the shoulder holster and pistol disappearing like a stage trick. “Murder may be an everyday concern to the scum that populates the Black, but we who are righteous still value human life, and I expect that you, as a copper, haven’t lost your capacity for it just yet.”

“What are you on about?” Pete demanded, though she had the sour feeling in her stomach that she already knew.

“Gerard Carver,” Morningstar said, and confirmed it. “He was one of ours. Poor boy. He and we need your help, Petunia.” He sighed and made a small sign in the air, not a cross but an older one that Pete recognized from her time with Grandmother Caldecott as a child, warding off the evil eye. With his shoulders slumped and his cannon hidden, Morningstar would look like any other old man stuck slightly behind the times, strolling down the street. Pete pitied the chav who tried to put the strongarm on Ethan Morningstar. Though not as much as she pitied herself, having to listen to him bang on.

“One,” Pete told him, “stop calling me Petunia like you bloody know me. Two, I’m not brick stupid. Jack’s told me all about the Order.”

“Oh.” Morningstar’s mouth twitched. “Has he, now? And what does the great Jack Winter have to say?”

“He says you’re no better than sadists,” Pete returned. “Witchfinders, torturers, and frustrated Puritans who should’ve gotten snuffed out with King James. If Carver was your mole, then he got what was coming to him, and I’ll thank you lot to leave me the fuck alone from this moment forth.” The stories she’d heard from some of Jack’s mates about the order were toe-curling. Cotton Mather would have been best mates with every one of them, and probably nip round to the pub after a rigorous day of ducking, skinning, and raping mages and sorcerers and anyone else who found themselves even vaguely involved with the occult.

“Funny,” Morningstar said. “I wouldn’t think Jack Winter would have anything to say about the Order at all. Being as he’s dead, you know.” He grinned to himself at that, and he kept grinning until Pete slammed her fist into his teeth.

She felt skin give on her knuckles and her bones go out of place, but the crunch of Morningstar’s perfect shark smile was satisfaction that overwrote pain.

“Petunia!” her mother cried, leaning down to help Ethan. “What is the matter with you!”

Morningstar spat out a tooth, but waved off Juniper grasping at his arm. “I’d hoped we could be civilized,” he said, getting back to his feet. “But I see you’re determined to find malice in any comment I might make.”

“Is that what I did?” Pete feigned shock. “Because from here it looks as if I’ve told off a stupid cunt babbling about someone who’s name he’s not even fit to say aloud.”

“The Order wants Carver’s killer,” Morningstar said. He hadn’t even raised his voice, and Pete found that a bit worrying. Usually people were a bit more upset when you’d hit them. “It’ll have them and you,” he continued. “You can resist all you want, but the Order is the hammer of God. And God has chosen you to bring Carver’s killer to us. Bad Catholic that you are, I wouldn’t expect you to recall, but God has a way of dealing with those who ignore His summons, Petunia.”

“Oh, sod off,” Pete sighed. “Take your little sorcerous intervention and shove it straight up your arse.”

“Oh, Petunia,” Juniper hissed. “Honestly.”

“You don’t matter to me one drop,” Morningstar told her. “I respect and care for your mother, and I’d prefer not to harm you, but you have knowledge and contacts that we don’t, and you can either use them to deliver us Carver’s murderer, or we will use further measures to show you the error of your ways in choosing to sin against God with your witchery.”

Pete folded her arms, partly to hide her freely bleeding hand and partly to show Morningstar he didn’t frighten her. “I would love to see you try, Ethan.”

“You live at Number forty-six in the Mile End Road,” Morningstar said with maddening calm. “Fourth floor, front corner flat. Your laundry is sent out once a week and you shop for essentials on Saturday morning at the Tesco Express several blocks away. Your associate Oliver Heath could probably tell me even more, if I asked the right questions.” He tilted his head, hat brim shadowing his stony eyes. “Need I continue, Petunia?”

“No,” Pete said, throat tight and heart jumping. “You’ve made your point.” Do as we say or we’ll hurt you and then move on to your nearest and dearest. Not a particularly original threat, as threats went, but a damned effective one. Pete wished she’d hit Morningstar much harder when she’d had the chance.

“Good. I’ll wish you a pleasant evening, then, and look forward to your findings on the death of the unfortunate Mr. Carver,” Morningstar said, turning and going to his car.

“Mum,” Pete said, grabbing at her sleeve when Juniper made to follow him. “What the Hell are you doing with those people? Do you know what they do to people like me? They’ve killed friends of Jack’s, Mum. And done things so much worse it’d turn your guts inside out. They’re the fucking BNP of the Black and you’re in their fan club?”

“They saved me,” Juniper sighed sadly. “They could save you too, Petunia. If you’d only let them in.” She pressed a card into Pete’s hand. “That’s where I’m staying. I know you’re as stubborn as your father, but if you ever want to have a real chat, I’d love it.”

“I’ll pencil it in!” Pete shouted as Juniper walked away. “Set a date for it in that alternate reality where Pete has a mother who’s both sane and a gives a rat’s arse!”

The BMW revved up its engine and screeched away in response, and Pete slumped against the alley wall, finding a Parliament and lighting it with shaking hands. She exhaled three times before she was able to bring her heart rate down to Regular from I’ll Bloody Kill You.

Dead men in museums, dead men made that way by black magic, and now her mother, demanding she bring the Order’s brand of justice.

“Bloody wonderful,” Pete said, stomping on her cigarette butt hard enough to kill it, had it been alive.

After she’d lit, dragged, and killed another Parliament, the door swung open. Mosswood stuck his head out. “There you are. I was beginning to wonder if it was time to drag the river.”

“I’d be better off, probably,” Pete muttered, watching the blue halo of smoke drift into the gaslamp light, dissolving like a ghost.

Mosswood cocked his eyebrow as he looked her over. “Your hand is bleeding.”

Pete examined her knuckles. They were skinned, bruised from Ethan Morningstar’s teeth, but not swollen, and she could move her hand with little enough effort that likely nothing was broken. “I’ll muddle through,” she said.

Mosswood took his pipe and a box of matches from his jacket, striking one on the brick wall. He sucked on the pipe, coaxing fragrant greenish smoke from it. “Care to talk about it?”

“No,” Pete said, rubbing her second smoke out on the brick next to the scratch from Mosswood’s match.

“Very well. As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted,” Mosswood said. “That photograph you showed me is disturbing.”

“Yeah?” Pete felt a renewed interest in the idiot Gerard Carver. If Morningstar and the Order were searching for the killer of one of their own, she’d only be their first stop. Someone with more talent and less ability to defend themselves would be next, on and on like dominoes until Morningstar got what he wanted. Fanatics, be they dressed in street rags or thousand-pound suits, operated in much the same way.

Besides, she’d promised Ollie, and now she’d also put the Order of Malleus onto him, unknowingly. She couldn’t very well back away now, even if she wanted nothing more.

“I haven’t seen anything like those marks on your dead man for a long time,” Mosswood said, quieter than his usual acerbic, professorial tones. “And for a Green Man, a long time is a very long time indeed.”

Pete went for a third fag but found herself empty. “Shit. Spit it out, Ian. You immortal types never just spit it out.”

“You’re very impatient, even for a human,” Mosswood said. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“I’ve got a piss-poor temper, too,” Pete said. “Get on with it.”

Mosswood looked up at the sky, hazy and dark gold from the lamps of London, starless as the inside of a coffin lid. “They’re very old, very powerful necromantic symbols, Pete. The magic they represent is the vilest the human mind can conceive, and I would not wish to meet the person attempting to use it face to face, if I were you.”

Pete considered. Necromancy was not something people who wanted to live long, healthful lives got themselves involved with. More like people who wanted to live short, bloody lives and rise back up to feast on the family cat. “Attempted?” she asked Mosswood.

He blew a smoke ring. “If they’d succeeded, I wager London would look a bit like the set of a cheap zombie film now.”

“But you don’t know?” Pete said. “I mean, what specifically they were trying to do, by killing Carver?” Other than get rid of a mole reporting their moves to his little club of god-botherers.

The Green Knight curled his lip back, showing his teeth. “I don’t and never have dabbled in flesh-crafting, Pete. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. And neither do you, if you want to keep on breathing.”

“Well, haven’t got a bloody choice, do I?” Pete said. Mosswood tapped out his pipe, and then carefully put it back in his jacket. He faced her, and put his hands on her shoulders. Pete saw the rush of green, great trees with roots down to the bottom of the world, trembling green buds passing into dry dead leaves that fell and rotted and gave birth to new shoots when they touched, the sting of electrostatic transference that allowed her talent, should she allow it, to siphon his power down like it was her own blood.

That was Mosswood. Life and sex and death. A druid like Jack respected his kind above all else. Except one. “You do have a choice, whether you think of it that way or not,” Mosswood said. “I know what you’re doing, keeping calm and carrying on, but in this case you mustn’t. You’re too valuable to necromancers, especially ones virulent as this. You and your particular quirk of talent.”

“Jack wouldn’t walk,” Pete said. Jack never walked away, even when he knew better. Pete could at least give him that, prove that he’d taught her well now that he wasn’t standing beside her any longer.

“My dear,” Mosswood sighed. “Jack isn’t here any longer. He belongs to Belial now, and if he were here, he’d say the same as I am.”

Pete smacked his hands off her. “As if I’d forgotten that, you fucking bastard.” It wasn’t a memory like her memories of Juniper, but more like a series of grainy snapshots that flicked in front of her mind impossibly fast, too fast to ever be stopped and put away, with the other nightmares. The snowy white of the demon’s pointed smile. The black, endless depths of its eyes as it dragged Jack to Hell. The snap and thump against her heart of two worlds vastly far apart shutting off from one another when they’d gone, leaving her standing in wet morning dew, smelling black smoke. Alone, as only those who’d seen and touched real evil, war zones and terrorist bombs and demon’s smiles, could be.

Mosswood didn’t reply, just went inside, door slapping closed behind him. Pete stayed, until the dizziness of memory and the sickness of seeing Belial’s face faded enough for her to go back through the layers of hidden London to the one where it was still daylight, find the Mini, and drive home.

CHAPTER 6

The long, honey light of sunset had cast long shadows by the time Pete made it back to Whitechapel and parked in the alley next to Number forty-six. Jack’s flat sat on top of a prewar building in the Mile End Road that had ceased to be crumbling and simply crumbled into four stories of brick, dry rot, cooking oil residue, and dust.

Still, for the last year, Pete had lived there with Jack. When he was there, with all his books and papers, his cigarette smoke staining the plaster, the repurposed record cabinet next to the sofa concealing the rotgut Irish whiskey that he insisted on drinking, it wasn’t a bad place. Not at all. Now, she supposed as she climbed four flights of stairs and let herself in, it was as good a place as any.

Jack’s piles of books and grimoires still existed just as he’d left them, on the worn built-ins and on the floor in tottering stacks nearly as tall as Pete herself. She’d rearranged some as she’d read through them, at least the stuff that wasn’t in Latin or Aramaic or simply jotted down by someone with such terrible handwriting it gave her eyestrain, but she hadn’t even attempted to organize anything to her liking. The books belonged to Jack, as did the specimen jars and decks of tarot cards, divination boards and talismans Jack had bartered, bought, or stolen on his various walkabouts to the darker corners of the Black. She left them, left his horrid, bachelor-flat furniture, and even let the old punk posters that curled at the edges to reveal the chipped, water-stained plaster hang.

Everything was just the same. Except for Jack.

Pete threw her bag and jacket onto the sofa and rooted in the ancient Amana icebox for a bottle of lager. She opened it and lit a fresh cigarette. The ashtray on the occasional table was full, but she couldn’t be arsed to empty it just then. She rubbed the spot in the center of her forehead where a headache was brewing. It made the cuts on her hand open again and begin to sting. She sighed and looked at her distorted reflection in the lager bottle. “Aren’t you a pitiful fucking sight?” she told it, getting up and going to the bathroom for antiseptic and bandages.

While she worked on her hand, she thought about what Jack would have done to Ethan Morningstar and his little group of elderly Goths when he’d found out what they’d tried to do to her. There wouldn’t even be a word to describe the type of fury Jack would rain down on the Order.

Pete poured peroxide over her hand, watching the blood sluice away, leaving pink streaks on the porcelain basin. She’d met a husband and wife when she was with the Met, a pair who’d lost their son to a drug dealer with a temper when the kid was barely seventeen. Pete had told them all the right things, the things she was supposed to say—grief counseling, the loss would be difficult, but they would eventually get over it.

Six months later, the husband started their car in a closed garage and when the wife found his body she went into care. Pete saw the dealer who’d stabbed their son put into Pentonville. It hadn’t helped.

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.

Pete wrapped her hand and taped the gauze. A faint halo of red droplets soaked through and stared up at her. Jack couldn’t help her. He was gone and she was still here. And that was fucking that.

She shut off the water and put away the first aid kit, going down the hall to Jack’s bedroom—their room, she supposed, now hers—and rifled through what had been his drawer of the wardrobe, tossing aside worn-out black denim, shredded socks, and Jack’s favorite Dead Kennedys shirt until she found his address book. Shoving it into her pocket, she turned to leave again, but the scent was too much. The stale smoke, the mix of herbs and pot that clung to Jack’s clothes, the supple creak of old, broken-in leather.

Pete picked up the shirt, twisting it between her hands. She pressed her face into it, allowing just one second. One second to imagine he was standing behind her, just out of reach. Then, before she lost her nerve, she pulled off her plain blouse and slipped the shirt over her head. It dropped off one shoulder and hung about her like a tunic over her skinny jeans, but Pete felt settled for the first time that day, as if she’d strapped on a stab vest rather than a ratty cotton shirt.

That done, she debated for a moment before she found her mobile and dialed her sister, MG, in Sussex.

MG and Pete hadn’t been on what she’d call civil terms since Jack had shown up, the first time. MG hadn’t taken kindly to her boyfriend stepping out with her teenage kid sister, and hadn’t taken kindly to Pete for reciprocating the interest. Pete had always thought that considering all the New Age crap MG preached, she’d be able to forgive and forget, but it wasn’t so, and they’d barely spoken after Connor had died. After a few rings, a voice mail box clicked on and continued the tradition.

“This is Morning Glory Caldecott. If you are interested in a tarot reading or having your chart done, please leave your name and details at the tone.”

Pete massaged the point between her eyes. “MG, it’s your sister. I saw Mum last night, and we need to talk about that. I’m at the same number still.” She dove back into the bag for her Parliaments as soon as the call was done, and remembering she was empty, went to her jacket on the stand. She needed a smoke or, fuck it, a stiff drink after the morning she’d had.

As she passed under the flat’s iron chandelier, possessed of only one working bulb to begin with, it blew out in a shower of sparks and glass shards. “Fuck,” Pete muttered, snapping her lighter so she wouldn’t trip over the piles of books and break her neck. Shadows danced away into all corners. Pete raised her lighter to pick her way between Jack’s things to the fuse box, but movement on the ledge outside the tall windows in the sitting room made her pause.

The windows were ran nearly floor to ceiling, fat sills for sitting protruding into the room. In the grand tradition of straight men who’d spent their adult lives living alone, Jack didn’t have any curtains covering the arched, bubbled glass. Pete raised the lighter, the small flame flickering in the draft. She’d met things come in from the cold before—bansidhe that Algernon Treadwell had sent after her and Jack. Cu sith, the hounds of the Underworld, sent to bring lost souls to their final rest.

Pete backed away from the glass. If she could get to the bedroom, she could find something made from cold iron, metal passed through fresh running water that would put a dent in whatever was trying to get in. There was no question that something was trying. Pete’s entire scalp prickled and her skin was both icy and burning. Feeling the encroachment of magic was akin to constantly seeing something from the corner of your eye, with the difference that when you turned to face it, the thing would still be there.

She took another step back, ancient floorboards popping under her foot. If she could get to the bedroom, she’d be all right.

That was big fucking if, wasn’t it? Humans ranked somewhere around three-legged cows in the food chain of the Black. Demons, poltergeists, Fae, creatures of the Underworld—all of them with a burning reason to wipe the slate on Petunia Caldecott. Really, the question wasn’t if she could be faster this time, but when the next time would roll around.

She stopped backing up. Whatever was out there wasn’t going to find her piss-scared and hiding under Jack’s mattress. She shut the lighter and stood in the shadows to let her eyes adjust. The shape outside was small and gray, clinging to the limestone ledge with slender talons. The owl stared at Pete, umoving, wings flexing to keep its balance as the thin gray daylight turned it into a black silhouette.

“Shit.” Pete shut her eyes and felt her pulse pounding in her temples as the claustraphobia of magic retreated. A bird. Just a bloody night bird, disoriented in the daytime. “You scared the Hell out of me, you nasty thing,” she told it.

You should be scared, Weir.

Pete lost her grip on the lighter, and it clattered to the floor, skidding away to glint in the shadow under Jack’s tatty armchair. “What the fuck do you want?” Not a bird. Something in the skin of a bird, a voice passed through the throat of a bird, but not a bird. The speakers came to her most often in her dreams, when she was more susceptible to psychic intrusion, but more and more her talent tuned her in when she was awake, hearing the voices of things that even mages like Jack couldn’t normally discern.

The owl pressed closer to the glass, its pale eyes never blinking. You know where your loyalties must lie, Weir. What binds you by blood. The guardian of the gateways will have her warrior, and when she calls you to the field of battle she wants you prepared.

“I…” Pete shook so she could feel her fingertips fluttering against her jeans. No matter how many times it happened, how many of the old creatures of the Black spoke through her talent, it still made her sick and faint. “Why me? Who is it this time?”

You know, Weir. You’ve seen me, even if you didn’t know me. You’ve been in my charge since the day you found the Black. A child of the crossroads.

Pete stared into the gold eyes of the owl. She’d never found owls unpleasant, quite the opposite. Their faces and their thin handlike claws were comforting. A small owl had lived in their back garden before Juniper had run off, and MG had painted a whole series of mechanical owls, lit by coal and fire, for her art levels.

But the eyes—those she’d seen before. The golden eyes of the cu sith, the girl all in white who’d visited Jack just before he’d lost his last fight against Belial. The owl’s eyes weren’t the eyes of a night bird. They burned like novas in outer space, ancient and only now reaching a spectrum of human understanding. “You were with Jack,” Pete said, almost too quiet for her own ears, never mind the owl outside.

I am the goddess of the gateway, it agreed. The Hecate, the three Fates of your life and every other. And you feel it happening, Weir. How the Black is changing. You feel the poison rising on the tide.

“Yes…” Pete realized she sounded stoned, high and dreamy. “I feel the tide.” She was cold, couldn’t feel her fingers or face any longer, as if she were losing blood from a mortal wound. An insidious presence, the source of the cold, suggested the voice of the owl was right. The Black had always been a dangerous place for those like her, but now it was different. Necromancers were working spells in the open, murdering people without pause. Demons were snatching souls out of the air like a hawk strikes a dove. The dead were restless and awake. Jack was locked in the vaults of Hell. “Yes,” Pete said again, still echoing in her own ears as if she’d chased a handful of Vicodin with a cup of absinthe. “I feel the tide.” She couldn’t move, couldn’t even try to force a scream as the Hecate’s voice and cold, bloodless presence filled the reservoirs of her talent and held her in thrall like the worst of the old silver screen vampires.

You must do what is required, Weir. Before the tide drowns all things, you must do what you were born to. Keep the seasons turning. The dead resting. The gateways impassable. If the gateways fall, the sea rushes in. This, you must never allow.

“What…” Pete swallowed, throat thick and her air slow. “What do you ask of me?” she mumbled at the owl, even though what she really wanted to do was chuck an especially heavy grimoire at the bloody thing and drop it in a heap down into the alley for attacking her with her own talent.

The owl spread its wings for balance, never blinking its gold eyes as it stared through her. What has always been your born task, Weir. Kill the crow-mage. Stop the Hag.

“I don’t understand…” Pete started, but in a flash of silver feathers the owl took flight.

You will.

Pete came back to her own body as if she’d been thrown, going off balance and sitting down hard, her ankle twisting under her. “Ow!” she shouted. “Fuck me!”

The window ledge was empty. The light in the chandelier was buzzing happily on. Her Parliament had gone to ash in the tray, and her ankle throbbed like a small, determined rodent was gnawing it for sustenance. Pete put her hands on her face, still numb as her skull throbbed with residual power. She was chilled and damp, as if she’d just stood in a rain. She let herself be still for a moment, just feel the floor under her and the warmth returning to her skin.

The Hecate visiting her and smothering her in her own power certainly meant it was a serious matter, but as far as Pete was concerned she could jam her head straight up her own arse. Jack was already dead, and she had more important things to do. Like find out who’d killed a man whom everyone he knew had a reason to want dead.

She stood and hobbled to the sofa, where she opened the record cabinet and had her drink after all. A visit from a creature as old as the stones of the world warranted it. Pete toasted the empty window with Jack’s whiskey. “Sod you,” she told the Hecate, and drank the glass down in one go.

CHAPTER 7

Pete couldn’t cross into the Black in Whitechapel. There were too many layers of psychic soot to allow any thin space to exist, caked up with murder and blood and the ashes of London’s dead. Jack had loved the place, the way it dampened his sight down to nearly nothing, except for the passing of Whitechapel’s own ghosts, trapped forever in the labyrinth of black magic and blacker deed that lanced through the narrow streets and leaning buildings like a parasitic nervous system.

Pete decided to walk, to clear her head of the talent hangover and also because it was near evening rush hour, and Hammersmith & City tubes would be packed. Near Tower Hamlets, she felt the pull again, the lessening of Whitechapel’s static scattering her senses. Jack said the white noise helped him sleep. Pete likened it more to living under a constant, ominous thunderhead. The promise of rain and the crackle of excited ions, ever waiting.

She decided to call on Ollie first. If she were honest, she’d admit she missed the sounds and sights of a police squad, the routine of finding and solving misdeeds. Even after what had happened at the flat, and with bloody Ethan Morningstar and his brigade of thugs running on the petrol of Jesus. Piety and murder went so well together, like curry and rice, or, more likely with a bunch of self-important real English like Morningstar, sausage and mash.

Pete allowed herself to rationalize a bit, that not telling Ollie some behatted wanker in Christ had it in for him was the smart move. Ollie only half-believed on his best day, and he’d likely do something stupid like go round to Morningstar’s and kick his door in, just to make a point. Then she’d be visiting Ollie in the intensive care ward, if not the mortuary.

She wasn’t taking the case because of Morningstar. She was doing it for Ollie, and for the very real possibility that some idiot necromancer had bitten off more than he could chew and kicked off a carnival of the grotesque and homicidal with the spell he’d left on Carver’s body. Demons and things of their ilk didn’t need much of an invitation to kick open the gates of Hell. Usually a name was enough.

The CID unit for Camden, which included six detectives counting Ollie responsible for serious crime, was housed in a single cavernous gray room crowned with buzzing fluorescent lights at the Holborn police station. Pete bypassed the front, where a uniformed officer waved her on. She was still recognizable here, if not for her great detectiveing or her status as Connor Caldecott’s daughter, then for the press coverage of her last case before she’d unceremoniously quit the force. Every law officer in Camden Town knew she’d been Ollie Heath’s partner, the bird who dropped off the map and down into the dark side. The dark side, of course, being superstition and mumbo-jumbo, the one thing most coppers hated even more than shit coffee and national holidays involving pyrotechnics.

Pete found her way to Ollie’s station, where she paged through the top of the snowdrift of papers that permanently occupied his desk. The Carver case had a fat autopsy report, and Pete flicked the cover open with her nail, looking at the large, high-res photos Nasiri had snapped before the cutting. The wounds on Carver still sent a spike straight through her head, even in 2-D form, and she flipped the file shut again.

“Snooping?”

Pete felt her heart fly up, slam against her chest, and fall back down. “Jesus fucking Mary Magdelene in a boat, McCorkle! Didn’t your mother teach you not to sneak?”

“Sorry,” he said with a shrug, settling himself at Pete’s old desk and putting his feet up. “Think your mouth is even rougher than Heath’s, you know?”

“I taught him his first dirty word,” Pete said. “I’m like a proud mum.” She looked pointedly at McCorkle’s feet. His shoes were pristine, and she could see her elongated, glaring face in the toes. They’d get covered in shit and blood soon enough, and then she thought McCorkle might be a bit more tolerable. “Is Ollie in? I need to speak with him.”

McCorkle dug out an evening Times from two days past and rattled it open. “He ain’t here. Nipped out to get supper.”

Pete bristled when she found herself facing rumpled newsprint, then reminded herself McCorkle was newly promoted and therefore arrogant. He’d learn. Or somebody would put their boot up his arse for being a prissy twat. “Did Ollie say he’d be coming back?” she said, giving McCorkle the same tone she used on the neighbor boy when he threw his transforming robot toys against the door of her flat.

“Might’ve,” McCorkle said absently, turning the page. “You can wait, if you like.”

Pete sat in Ollie’s chair and took one of the biscuits from his righthand top drawer, crunching it just loudly enough to overshadow McCorkle rattling the paper. “Where’d you come over from, McCorkle?”

“Paddington Green,” he said. “Missing Persons.”

“They all get found, then?” Pete flicked her crumbs onto McCorkle’s side of the desk. He looked at them as if they were live ants, then folded the paper away. In a stolid, Norse way, McCorkle was nice-looking, Pete supposed. His forehead was too thick and his hair was shaped vaguely like a blond wire scrub brush, but the crushed-and-reset nose and the bulky neck-deficient torso would do it for some women.

“You know,” McCorkle told her, ruining any goodwill Pete might have allowed him by opening his mouth back up, “if even half of what they say about you is true, you have no business being in this room.”

“Oh?” Pete wondered if she was going to have to punch somebody else in the mouth. Punching people got very tiresome. Sherlock Holmes didn’t have to go around smacking skulls together.

“No business at all,” McCorkle said. “I may not have a dad who was Supercopper, but I did the training and the time. And I sure as Hell didn’t leak sensitive evidence to an informant and then quit the squad to avoid censure.”

“Is that what I did?” Pete said. The rumor varied. Sometimes she’d bollocksed her last investigation, sometimes she’d joined a cult. Most times she’d simply quit because she couldn’t hack finding four children catatonic and never catching the man who’d done it. Officially. The truth was somewhat more satisfying, but Pete wasn’t going to try and explain hungry ghosts to McCorkle or anyone else in the Holborn nick. She didn’t owe it to them. They’d talk no matter what.

“That’s what you did,” McCorkle agreed. “Makes you a shit cop. Always were one, to my way of thinking.”

Pete forced an expression that was simply nothing, not anger and not agreement. “Why aren’t you throwing me out, then? You too much of a saint to soil your good cop hands?”

McCorkle put his feet down and booted up his computer, scrolling over to the HOLMES database and beginning to type in case numbers. “Heath likes you, you get a pass. He’s a good bloke.”

“He is,” Pete agreed, as Ollie backed into the squad room with two bags of takeaway. She leaned into McCorkle’s half of the desk. “I wager you and I will see each other some day when Ollie isn’t a factor,” she murmured. “And then perhaps neither of us will have to be so polite.”

McCorkle raised his nearly white eyes to hers. “Perhaps,” was all he said.

“Oi, Pete!” Ollie said, dumping the takeaway on his desk. “Fuck you doing here? Homesick?” He pulled the wrap off his plastic fork and threw it at McCorkle. “Freddy, go eat at the kid’s table or something. Pete and I need to have a talk.”

Pete gave McCorkle a cheery wave as he grabbed his food and slumped away, pouting. Ollie sighed and opened his kebabs. “Fucking twat. Wasn’t bothering you, was he?”

“On the contrary,” Pete said. “He’s a veritable ray of sunshine.” She listened to the trill of phones and the click of keyboards, the inspectors and their detective sergeants and constables going about their day. “I’m making progress,” Pete said, before Ollie could ask. He dabbed at a spot of brown sauce on his shirt.

“You close to telling me why this bastard got himself topped? Because his life is a blank fucking slate. Good schools, competent at his job, no dodgy tax shelters, bank balance not even enough for a night at the pub with a discount prozzie. Lived with his mum, for Christ’s sake.”

“That what you needed to talk about?” Pete said, helping herself to a cube of beef.

“Right,” Ollie said. “It’s a bit too perfect. Somebody that boring, you either expect them to do themselves in with Mummy’s sleeping tablets, or have a dungeon full of Estonian teenagers hidden under the back garden. But I’ve turned up shit, and that bothers me, because shit means I’ve got shit on who’d want him killed.”

“He was definitely arse deep in black magic,” Pete said. “The symbols are necromancy, but for what I don’t know yet. Beyond that, all I can say is idiots who dabble in that sort of thing often find themselves dead or otherwise inconvenienced. Since Carver was the first to go, I’m betting he had something they wanted, or had served his purpose. Not sure what the purpose was yet.” Or his flesh-crafting friends had found Carver’s dirty secret. Pete wondered about that. The death felt like overkill, even for a traitor. There was purpose behind it, rather than punishment. And the power dripping from Carver’s corpse was something no socerer who wasn’t completely addled would allow to go to waste.

Gerard Carver had died for something other than his penchant for deception. Pete wagered when she knew what, she’d know who.

Ollie tossed his empty takeaway container into his overflowing desk bin. “You’re good, Pete. Always said, give you twenty-four hours and a cuppa and you’d solve the Lindbergh baby and the Ripper killings.” He folded his hands over his stomach. “The better one of us, you were.”

“Don’t say that, Ollie,” Pete told him. She stood and collected her things, being quick about it. “I wasn’t a good cop. I quit.”

“Do you ever miss it?” Ollie asked, as Pete made her move to leave. The CID room didn’t feel welcoming and familiar any longer. Now she could feel the stares and hear the murmured conversations over the everyday sounds. She was a visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.

“All the time, Ollie.” She turned her back and passed down the wide center avenue between the desks, which started at the door and ending at the big murder board where she’d put up her share of case notes. She turned her back to that too, and studiously ignored the stares of the working detectives as she left the station.

CHAPTER 8

Retrieving the Mini, Pete drove toward Kensington. She passed the red brick edifice of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the pavilion at the edge of Kensington Gardens, gold leaf gleaming in the late morning light against the nascent green of the foliage beyond, which had just begun to show signs of life after a winter that hadn’t done anyone, plant or human, any favors.

She picked up Bayswater Road and circled in ever-widening loops through single-lane back streets leading to tourist-choked main roads until she found parking near Queensway. Threading her way through the gawkers and well-heeled locals outside the tube station, she climbed to Lawrence’s flat and knocked.

Right now, Gerard Carver was the last thing on her mind, but she had to think about him. Thinking about her mother, or the Order, or what the Hecate had said just made her want to curl up and never leave Jack’s flat again. Murder was the saner option. Murder, she at least understood. Perhaps she could even do what Morningstar demanded, though she doubted it. She was opposed to turning over the necromancer responsible just on principle, even though the git probably deserved it. Morningstar was a sanctimonious twat, as only old, white Englishmen with the Lord in their corner could be, and she hated him reflexively, far more at the moment than Carver’s killer. But she owed Ollie answers, and needed something to leverage to keep him safe from the Order, so she hit the door again. “Lawrence! I know you’re bloody at home. You never leave.”

After a moment of locks scuffling, the door opened. “Your knickers on fire?” Lawrence demanded. “Why the fuss?” He blinked when he really saw her. “Pete!”

She managed to spread her hands and apply what she hoped was a charming expression. “Knew you were in. You’re fucking agoraphobic these days.”

Lawrence stepped forward and yanked her inside and into the fold of a bear hug. “You know where I live, you feel like stoppin’ by. Why I need to go out?”

“Get some sun,” Pete said, and poked his arm, which gave not an inch. “You’re looking positively Caucasian, Lawrence.”

“Fuck off,” he said amiably, locking the door behind her and twitching a bindle of herbs and red thread back into place over the frame. “Glad you’re here, you and your little razor blade for a mouth. Beginnin’ to think you didn’t like me.”

“Been busy,” Pete said, staying in the front hall while Lawrence went to his pocket-sized kitchen. In point of fact, she hadn’t seen him since the day Jack had gone. She’d wanted it that way. Lawrence was Jack’s best friend—which was no mean feat, considering the rapidity with which Jack alienated almost everyone he crossed paths with. Lawrence was as replete with memories as Jack’s flat. Plus, he was a decent bloke and a decent friend, and in the way of decent people would want to commiserate, give and get sympathy. He would want to remember Jack, and Pete didn’t have the strength to heap on any more memories.

Lawrence came back with two tumblers full of thick, viscous green liquid and held her at arm’s length. “So. Miss Petunia. You blown back to my door—for what?” He grinned at her crookedly, teeth white enough for an advert. “I know you never be without trouble riding on your shoulder.”

Pete decided blunt was best. Lawrence was at least too polite to throw her out. “I need you to tell me whatever you know about necromancy.”

The smile and the warmth went out of Lawrence’s face, a candle covered with a jar. Taking a seat on the leather sofa, he drained his tumbler and offered Pete the other. She caught a whiff of something dead and sea-borne and crinkled her nose. “Fuck, no thanks. What is that shit?”

“Seaweed,” Lawrence said, as if it were a natural thing to pour down your gullet. “Your loss. Might improve your mind, so you don’t go around askin’ about black deeds that’ll get you dead.” He took a joint from the mellowed ivory box at his elbow and offered it to her once the end was a cozy orange. Pete inhaled and passed it back. Like the Newcastle for Mosswood, it was a gesture of hospitality, the handshake of Lawrence’s mostly white witchcraft and Pete’s talent, which was no color she could discern.

Lawrence dragged like a movie cowboy on a handmade cigarette and let the pleasant murk fill his sitting room when he exhaled. “Now,” he said. “I’ve gotta ask: Why a smart girl like you messing with necromancers?”

“I didn’t mess with anyone,” Pete said. “They killed a bloke and left him in broad view in the center of the fucking British Museum, so they rather brought this on themselves.” She dug out her mobile and called up the photo. Lawrence’s hand-tended and magically coaxed pot at least blunted the edges enough that the damn thing didn’t give her a migraine, but she still held the mobile gingerly as she passed it to Lawrence.

He whistled, and smoothed his free hand over his forehead. Lawrence was generally unflappable, but his pupils flexed as he examined the photo. He handed it back and took a quick, nervous drag. “This ain’t somethin’ you want, Petunia.”

“I just need to know what they mean,” Pete said, snatching the fag back. “What kind of spellcraft they’re designed for. Who’d know enough about necromancy to carve them into a bloke’s torso in the first place.”

“You think I know?” Lawrence barked a laugh. “I’m flattered you think I run with that kind of crowd, but truth? I’m a white witch. I stay clear of the bone-shaker’s business and gods willin’ they stay outta mine.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re strictly ballroom,” Pete said. “But you did spend twenty years being Jack’s best mate, Lawrence. Don’t take me for an idiot. You at least know who can tell me, if you’re concerned for your virtue.”

Lawrence tipped his head back against the sofa. “Maybe I don’t wanna tell you because I know you’ll get yourself a whole lot more than trouble if you keep pushin’ this.”

Pete set the remains of the fag in Lawrence’s ashtray and mimicked his pose, pulling her legs under her. “Maybe I’ll sit here, smoke all of your good shit, and generally make myself a nuisance until you change your mind.”

“Fuck me!” Lawrence put his hands over his face and groaned. “You gonna get yourself killed just as dead as that dead bastard on your screen, you keep this up, Pete.”

“Duly noted,” Pete said. “Who, Lawrence? You know I can tell.” She pointed to his jittering knee and giggled once. She wasn’t immune to the effects of a good garden witch’s product. “You’re a terrible liar.”

“Normal people be thinkin’ that’s a good thing,” Lawrence muttered.

“Yeah.” Pete stretched, lying out on the length of Lawrence’s decadently squashy armchair. “But you’re not fucking normal, Lawrence. Neither of us. So you gonna tell me, or am I going to park in your sitting room for the evening?”

He lifted his head and glared at her before he sat up and rooted around in the occasional table that held the box. “Might know a bloke has the cipher to your nasty little drawings. Might. I ain’t promisin’.”

“Wasn’t so hard, was it?” Pete asked him. She lit a Parliament to chase the sweet, sticky resin from her lungs and blew a blue halo. “More necromancers, then? When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way, sort of thing?”

“No,” Lawrence said, looking at the scrap of vellum in his hand before passing it over. “They worse.”

“Now I’m intrigued,” Pete said. “Worse than blokes who skulk about in the night buggering corpses for a thrill. How disappointed their mums must be.”

“Listen,” Lawrence said. “When Jack and I were much younger an’ less bright, he met this bloke who was … an antiquarian, I guess. Kind of a collector. Except not of anything you’d want business with. Things from the Black, books and worse. Makes Jack’s little cabinet up in his flat look like a set of fuckin’ dollies.” Lawrence rose and went into the kitchen again, but this time poured a dark rum from an umarked bottle into a jam jar and sat back down, swallowing the drink in one go. “Jack traded him for a medieval grimoire, I think, nothin’ special. It was the collector. He were a spook show. Wanted to write down the things Jack saw when he went off into the never-never, when the sight took its hold.” Lawrence looked into his glass as if he wished it would fill of its own accord. “Wanted his … visions, he called ’em, even though you ask me, were just Jack talkin’ his usual brand of bullshit.” He put the glass aside and rubbed his palms, resting his head against his hands and not looking at Pete, or indeed anything in the actual, visible dimensions of his flat. “Found out later he was an Antiquarian, capital A. They beings of—they’re made up of memories, you understand, eat ’em and use ’em to maintain. Collect memories and visions and grimoires and nasty bits in a place called the lost library. Not many souls, even on the black side, think it’s a real place, see? Supposed to be a collection like you ain’t never seen. Holding every manner of dark evil thing that any dark evil man has lost through history, includin’ their minds.” He extended the square of paper toward Pete, and she saw it wasn’t a scrap but a piece of stock, worn round at the endges. “Antiquarian gave Jack this,” Lawrence said. “In your time of dying, he told him. Wanted his memories and his spells. You call on him with that.”

“And the Antiquarian,” Pete said, taking the card and turning it. “He’ll help me?”

Lawrence folded his shaking fingers into a tent. “If you call what those things do help. Yeah. He do that, and gladly for you, I’m sure.”

“Good.” Pete looked at the card. The lettering was faded to a mellow brown, nearly unreadable, and the words weren’t in a language she understood. “How do we get in touch?”

Lawrence took the card back. “If you’re really serious about this nonsense, I do a bit of divination with the cantrip on this here card and we meet when they say we meet.” He tossed the card on the table and got up, opening the door. Pete took the hint, stopping on the threshold to touch his arm. “Thank you,” she said. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

“One thing in return for all this, I ask,” Lawrence told her, folding his opposite hand over hers. “I’ll be with you when you talk to these bastards.”

“Oh no,” Pete said immediately. “Lawrence, I couldn’t ask you…”

“Listen.” Lawrence shrugged her off. “I made Jack a promise. I promised him that I always look out for you, and I take that serious. A promise to a mage on his deathbed about as serious as they come.” Lawrence’s mouth quirked. “ ’Course in Jack’s case, I made it in the loo at Paddington Station…”

“Lawrence, that’s sweet and all,” Pete said. “But this is my problem. The last thing you want is necromancers calling at your door.”

“I made Jack a promise,” Lawrence insisted. “You either go with me, or I’ll burn that divination up right now and you won’t be goin’ at all.”

“You’re a stubborn git, you know that?” Pete said. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have backup when she went chasing after a clutch of necromancers who’d already proven they were willing to slit one throat, and Lawrence was large, imposing, and motivated backup to boot. “You can come,” she allowed. “But you don’t flip your lid if you hear something you don’t like, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Lawrence said. “Doubt you gonna show me anything Jack hasn’t already.”

“Very well,” Pete said. “You call me when you’ve got something.” She descended Lawrence’s untrustworthy stairs, boards groaning under her boots.

“You tell trouble,” he called after her, “he comes around, just keep his ass right on movin’.”

“Right,” Pete muttered, shouldering through the front door and back into the rush and hum of the world. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

CHAPTER 9

The city mortuary at Wapping was plain and practical, with nothing haunted or ethereal in its makeup, and Pete appreciated that fact. Ghosts were easier to deal with if they appeared among steel refrigerators, faded by fluorescent bulbs.

She found Dr. Nasiri in one of the autopsy rooms, working over a skinhead with an impressive sector of his skull cracked apart like a clay flowerpot.

“Hello there,” Nasiri shouted over the whine of her Stryker saw. “Put on a mask and booties, will you?”

Pete did as she asked. “I’d hoped to get another look at Mr. Carver,” she shouted back. “And possibly some closeups of his wound patterns.”

“Sure. I’ll get you copies when I’m done here,” Nasiri said. She put the saw aside and lifted out a section of the skinhead’s ribcage, the way Pete would lift the top off a plastic tub. The Y-incision and the thin line of the saw blade bisected his blurry hand-done tattoos and a ragged white scar over his left nipple.

Pete had gotten past the reflexive throat clench sometime during her probationary year at the Met, but she didn’t return Nasiri’s smile as she set the ribcage aside in a metal tray and worked to remove and measure the internal organs, slapping them onto the scale with the acumen of a butcher.

“Know what did this naughty boy in?” she said in a bright tone, as if she were a professor asking question.

“Zombies?” Pete offered, pointing to the hole in the man’s head.

“Stupidity,” said Nasiri. “Tried to rob an off-license and the owner slammed him in the skull with a cricket bat when the guy called him, quote, a curry-stink Paki bastard and then foolishly turned his back. Apparently his favorite vodka was on the high shelf.”

Pete moved a step away from the steel table. “Tick a box for Darwin, then.” Her head was beginning to throb as Lawrence’s hospitality wore off, and the smells and sights of the mortuary weren’t mixing in a way she’d call pleasant, or even tolerable.

“Stupidity is the leading cause of death in the United Kingdom,” Nasiri said. Her hands kept moving, weighing the man’s heart even as she stared at Pete across his chest cavity. “But not for your Gerard Carver, is it?”

“You’re asking me?” Pete said. Her mask pressed against her mouth, a sterile papery kiss, and the air conditioning in the mortuary had made her mouth dry.

“Aren’t you the one with the spooky psychic powers?” Nasiri said, her cheeks twitching. “Aren’t they why Heath has you coming in here on the sly, telling me to slip you autopsy files, and getting evidence from you in turn he couldn’t possibly use in a court trial? He believes in your uncanny visions from the other side?”

Pete pulled her mask off, the itchy paper all at once suffocating. Nasiri was taking the piss, and she knew better than to argue with a skeptic. She’d been one for too long to think there was any merit to it.

“I’m not psychic,” she said, crumpling up the mask and tossing it at the bin. She missed.

“At least you can admit it to me,” Nasiri said. “I mean, bored housewives saying bodies will be found near water, I at least understand. They’re attention seekers. You I don’t get at all.”

“I’m not telling Ollie I can wave my hands and make a killer appear,” Pete said. “I’m not a fake and Ollie’s not an idiot. Not like this is the Yorkshire police and Peter Sutcliffe. It’s one man, and I really can help Ollie close his case. Wondering whether you think I’m full of shit or not isn’t going to keep me up nights.”

“You used to be a DI,” Nasiri said. She packed the organs back into the skinhead’s chest, plopped the ribcage back into place, and covered the table with a paper sheet. “You used to be a good DI. And yet you chucked it to chase spirits. If you’re not psychic, you must believe there’s something else out there. Or else you’re a complete nutter and hide it very well.”

Pete removed her paper booties and threw them into the bin at the same time Nasiri pitched her gloves and paper scrubs. “Are we going to have the conversation about how you’re a woman of science and you’ll expose me? Because I tell you, I don’t fancy it.”

Nasiri stuck her forearms under the pedal sink and coated them in soap, scrubbing vigorously. “I’m not trying to be a bitch, Pete. I’ve never seen anything like what was done to Gerard Carver. I’m willing to buy you might have insight, if not the power to pull a unicorn out of your arse. You don’t drag Ollie into the mumbo-jumbo and I won’t grill you too much about what exactly it is you’re into when you’re not being a good fairy for the Met.”

Pete wasn’t used to having someone else look out for Ollie, and she wasn’t sure she liked it very much. “I’m just trying to make sure Ollie knows what he’s dealing with,” she said.

“Then we won’t have a problem,” Nasiri said. “I’m not a nonbeliever, Pete, all cold dead flesh and electron microscopes, but I’m not big on blind faith.”

“Finally something we agree on,” Pete muttered. Nasiri went a short way down the corridor to a set of offices, leading Pete to the one with her nameplate.

“It’s too bad we didn’t work together. I think that would’ve gone well.” She unlocked her office from her keyring. “I’ll just get you those photos.”

Nasiri disappeared into her office, and Pete leaned against the wall, wondering if anyone would noticed if she smoked. As if her tête-à-tête with McCorkle hadn’t driven the stake in far enough, Nasiri had made sure. This wasn’t her world any more. The Met thought she’d gone over to the side of kooks and crime scene ghouls, and Pete couldn’t even explain herself without sounding like exactly that. What would she even tell the rational and the plodding of London’s finest? Magic is real and your nightmares have teeth? That was a fast trip to a psychiatric ward if she ever heard one.

Pete stuck a Parliament in her mouth and tongued the filter, but didn’t light it. Overhead, the fluorescent tubes buzzed, an insect heartbeat, flickering off and on, creating a shadow pulse. What the Hell was taking Nasiri so long?

Far away a door banged open and shut, and gurney wheels clattered on tiles. Pete felt the small part of her mind that sensed the tides, the flow and flux of the Black, unfold and send trembling fingers forth.

The hall lights snapped on, off, on, and Pete watched through the open door of the autopsy bay as they gave the skinhead’s lumpy form under his sheet dimension and life.

Snap again, and when Pete’s eyes adjusted to the light a shadow stood in the door of the autopsy room, no shape really, just a thin slice of darkness the size of a man, whose presence sent needles of ice through Pete’s mind. The thing peered at her from a tear in the Black, a bleeding intersection of the daylight world and what lay beneath.

She didn’t stay frozen, like she had when the owl fixed its gaze on her. Pete snatched her pepper spray from her bag and aimed a concussive stream of it at the figure. “Come on then!” she shouted.

The hall lights snapped. The pepper spray spattered across the tile floor. The doorway was empty.

Nothing waited for her, just on the other side of the Black. The lights stabilized, and the mortuary hallway remained bland and sterile as ever. Pete felt her heart drumming at a thousand RPMs, and her blood was rushing so loudly in her ears it came in like a radio station. She didn’t hear Nasiri until the doctor tapped her arm.

“Everything all right?” Nasiri extended a plain brown envelope, inter-office mail for the Wapping police station. “You look a bit startled.”

Pete shoved the pepper spray into her back pocket and took the envelope in one smooth montion. The last thing she needed was Nasiri thinking she saw things. Her opinion, and that of the entire CID, was already low enough. “Just thought I heard someone back there in the autopsy.”

“The bodies don’t generally get up and walk about on their own,” Nasiri said. “Though if they do, you’ll be my first call.”

“Cheers.” Pete walked slowly leaving the mortuary, keeping her face calm and trying not to let the throb of her heart vibrate her. She hadn’t imagined the thing in the doorway—her skin was still prickling with the fever of close proximity to the dead, and not just the dissected skinhead on the table. Whatever had tried to push through had been of the Underworld, and it had wanted her badly enough to manifest in broad daylight, inside a building full of steel and computers, anathema to ghosts. Wanted her, not just whatever member of the living it happened on first. Pete wagered that whoever they were, Gerard Carver’s killers knew she was in the mix. It took her until the tube station to shake off the cold.

CHAPTER 10

Lawrence didn’t call the next day, or the next, and Pete had begun to think he never would. She was set on going into the city for a few hours and trying to finish off some more of Jack’s unfinished business—bills, council taxes. The transfer of the dubious deed to his flat would have to wait until he was declared legally dead rather than simply missing. And for that, Pete would have to file a report. Have to explain why she’d waited six months. Have to have a reason and for that reason, make up a lie her brain simply didn’t have the capacity for at the moment. English property law was nearly as complex as the symbols that marked Gerard Carver’s corpse, and Pete could wait until she, too, had shuffled loose the mortal coil to deal with Jack’s estate.

Her mobile trilled at last while she was at the DIY shop finally buying new bulbs for the sodding chandelier. Pete shoved the mobile between her ear and shoulder as she handed over a tenner to the store clerk. “It’s about bloody time, Lawrence.”

“Who the fuck is Lawrence? And what the fuck do you mean, “you’ve seen Mum?” Pete’s sister MG screeched.

“And hello to you too, Miss Morning Glory,” Pete said. “Been into the ceremonial gin, have we? You sound a bit pissed.”

“Nobody has seen Mum for years,” MG shouted. “And why you, out of everyone we know? Why London? She hates London.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Pete sighed. She stopped on a corner of the pavement, letting the Whitechapel Road crowd flow around her, coming and going from the pubs and money-changers and newsagents next to the Whitechapel tube. “Don’t have to tell me you two were the fast friends, MG. You think I didn’t notice Mum didn’t bother with me if she could help it, even before she took flight on her broomstick?”

“She called me a few months ago,” MG said. “Babbling shit about reconciliation and Jesus bloody Christ and probably John fucking Lennon for all the sense she made, but actually dropping in on you? What the Hell is going on, Petunia? I’m so upset by all this I haven’t even been able to do my normal readings, never mind communicate with my spirit guides.”

“What happened to Cthulhu, or whatever tentacled horror that commune of yours worshipped?” Pete asked. “Thought they frowned on strapping on a scarf and reading tarot for the locals.”

“Oh, fuck off,” MG sighed. “The commune was rubbish. I’ve been living in Sussex for five years. My boyfriend Gil owns an esoteric shop, and I do readings. I’ll have you know it’s very lucrative.”

“I’ll be sure to send Gil a congratulatory bouquet,” Pete said. “Did Mum say anything specific to you? About the reconciliation?”

“Who could make sense of that closeminded Jesus ’n’ friends shit?” MG said. “And you—are you still a bloody fascist copper, goose-stepping in good order like Da?”

Pete lifted her eyes for a moment, asking whoever might offer it for patience, and then tried to sound happy. “Lovely talking, MG, but I’m afraid I’ve got more pressing matters, like dropping a frying pan on my foot. If I see Mum again, is there a message I should pass on?”

“Why you?” MG said again. “You said it yourself. She didn’t even like you.”

Pete made her free hand into a fist. “Goodbye, MG. Blessed fucking be.”

She leaned against the outside of the DIY shop and took some theoretically relaxing breaths. So her mother was serious about the Order, serious enough to call up her sister and try to engulf her in the fold. Pete didn’t know why she was surprised—MG had been Juniper’s favorite from the get-go. Which wasn’t hard, since she was older, and interested in all the things Juniper thought girls should be interested in, namely boys and looking pretty to catch one. Pete, in that respect, had been a grave disappointment.

Her mobile trilled again and she nearly pitched it into the path of an oncoming bus, except that Lawrence’s name came up on the screen. “Please tell me this is good news, because otherwise I’m going to start kicking small, fluffy things,” Pete said.

“I got a place,” Lawrence said. “You close?”

“I can be,” Pete said. “I’m near the tube.”

“Okay,” Lawrence said. “Meet me at Kensington High Street, but make it quick. These types, they don’t linger for long. They do the damage and move on.”

“I’ll be there,” Pete insisted, shoving her way down the steps of the tube station. Once, she thought she’d been followed by another man in a black coat, but he got off in the city and Pete rode the rest of the way to Kensington alone.

She met Lawrence on the high street, a place Pete had always considered London as the outside world thought of it. Narrow streets, uneven pavement, quaint shops full of posh artifacts, begging for Hugh Grant or Colin Firth to pop out from amongst the antique books and obscure oil paintings and sweep you off your feet, into a charming adventure full of eccentric side characters with amusing accents. As far from the real city as one could get and still be in it. Lawrence waited in front of one of the few closed-down shops in view, jiggling his left foot and habitually checking his watch. Pete figured from the stares of the well-heeled passersby that she looked out of place as he felt. Neither of them belonged to storybook London, and unless they were rock stars looking to snap up a row house, nobody in Kensington wore army boots, black canvas pants, and a Penetration shirt with the neck cut out. Pete returned the stares of a pair of helmet-haired biddies with a snarl before she reached Lawrence.

“This is not where I’d expect some kind of shadowy memory-eater to hang his hat. Its hat. Whatever.”

Lawrence shrugged, a bit jerkily. He was nervous as a scalded cat, and Pete wished he’d listened to her and just stayed home. “This is where they say to go, this is where we go. Or we could just forget the whole thing. Like I been sayin’ we should.”

“We’ve come this far,” Pete said. “What’s a little divination between friends?”

Lawrence mumbled something that could have been either a prayer or an impressive string of curses, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “In there, then.”

The closed shop’s window held a globe painted with drawings of constellations, a dead and mummified fern, and an impressive amount of dust. The fading gold script across the glass read simply CURIOSITIES.

“Remember what we discussed, and keep your trap shut,” Pete said. “You’re jumpy enough without chatting up a storm.”

“Fine by me. We go in there, I blind, deaf, and mute. Don’t want none of what he’s selling.” Lawrence hunched inside his army coat, managing to look small even though he had a good half a foot on Pete.

A bell chimed, musical and out of place when they entered. The interior of the shop was as musty and cluttered as the window was bare. It wasn’t a comfortable sort of clutter, to support the cultivated air of the mysterious that so many antique shops in Kensington worked to maintain, but the books cramming the cases and cascading across the dust-covered counter were the genuine article. “Fuck me,” Pete murmured. “Are they all grimoires, then?”

“Most,” Lawrence said. “Bloke who ran this place dropped off a few years ago. Inland revenue. But he were a twat before, and I ain’t surprised he dealt with the Antiquarians.”

Pete picked up the plain cloth volume on a display stand and opened the front cover. Plain black print declared, with frightening practicality, Malleus Maelificarum. Even though the book itself was utter nonsense and Cotton Mather was a sexually repressed twat of the first order, the thin paper and running ink, and the many notations in the margins on effectiveness and practical results, made Pete drop the thing again and swipe her hands on her trouser legs. She banged on the counter bell instead. “Oi! Anyone home?”

Lawrence stayed as close to the door as he could without being outside on the pavement, hands shoved in his pocket, boot tapping. Pete tossed a paperback pulp at him, cover depicting a heaving-bosomed blonde tied to a cross, menaced by faceless figures in crimson robes. The Demon’s Bride. “Will you cut that out? You look like we’re in here trying to cop.”

“Aren’t we?” Lawrence muttered. “In one fashion or another?”

“Oh, for the sake of all the saints.” Pete chimed the desk bell again. “Hello.”

The door to the back room of the shop rattled, and a figure wrapped in tweed that had to be as old as some of the books in the shop appeared. He blinked at Pete through round spectacles, greasy silver hair falling in his face. “Ah. Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Pete agreed. “Waiting.”

The man extended a hand, silver rings to the knuckle on each finger, but Pete didn’t bite. The Black wasn’t the place for friendly handshakes. You never knew what you might be touching in addition to skin. “Tyrell,” he said, dropping the hand back. His eyes flicked over Lawrence. “You’re the man?”

“Hell no, I ain’t your man,” Lawrence snorted. “She’s the one who wanted this. Far as I’m concerned, you can crawl right back into that hole you oozed out of.”

Tyrell blinked, and then smiled at Pete, slow and crooked as if a rock had rolled back from the entrance to a cave. “How lovely,” he said. “A damsel in need of rescue.”

“Let’s keep the bullshit down to a dull roar, shall we?” Pete suggested. Tyrell’s tongue flicked out and back in, and he grimaced as if the air tasted bad.

“Whatever you say, my dear,” he said at last. Lawrence was staring a hole in her over Tyrell’s head, but Pete kept herself reserved and stony. She was willing to be polite, but she wasn’t willing to play the courting games so many creatures of the Black demanded. She’d always been crap at being obsequious, and she wasn’t going to lick Tyrell’s boots just so he could maybe, possibly but probably not give her a scrap or two of new insight into Gerard Carver’s death markings.

“That is what I say,” she agreed. Drawing out the folder Nasiri had given her, she fanned the photographs on the counter, dislodging dust that was likely older than she was. “You know anything about this?”

Tyrell coughed and waved at the air in front of his face. “Not here,” he said. “Are you stupid as well as unpleasant?”

“Oh, I assure you,” Pete said, shoving the photos a bit closer, “we haven’t even scratched the surface of just how unpleasant I can be.”

“Pete,” Lawrence said, and gave her a hard squeeze on the arm. “We know how it works,” he assured Tyrell. “But we wanna be sure you ain’t wastin’ our time.”

“I dare say there isn’t much you could do to me if I was,” Tyrell said, with the peculiar glee of small children who enjoy stamping on fluffy things. “You, after all, are the ones who need something and I am the one who has it.”

“I don’t need it that badly,” Pete assured him. “I’m not a prissy white witch you can run in circles. If you can’t help me, then piss off and let me find someone who can.”

“Oh, my dear,” Tyrell said. “You think you frighten me, with your rough edges and your empty threats? I am an Antiquarian. To collect for the lost library, I’ve bargained with things far worse than a kitchen witch and the whore of a dead mage.”

Pete felt all the joints in her hands and arms tense, and she forced them to relax one at a time. She wasn’t going to give Tyrell the reaction he was fishing for. Wasn’t going to shout and cry simply because he’d called her a name. That was the game, and she wasn’t playing any more. Jack might have risen to every invitation to smack someone in the gob, but she was better than that. And if not entirely, at least better than some cackling creature who looked like a goblin had mated with a Jim Henson puppet.

Tyrell wilted a bit under her glare. “Far be it from me to judge,” he said, clapping his hands together. “The terms are blood, spellcraft, or trade. Judging by your general air of poverty and the fact that you aren’t a sorcerer, I suppose it’ll be trade.” He traced the marks across Carver’s torso, finger leaving an oily streak on the photograph. “I’ll search the archives and you’ll give me a little something to store in them in return, yes?”

“Pete,” Lawrence said at once. “Don’t do it. Don’t give anything you got to an Antiquarian.”

“Witch, kindly shut the fuck up before I disengage your jaw from your skull,” Tyrell said, eyes gleaming. “The young lady and I are engaged in bartering.”

“All right, all right,” Pete said. “No need to open your trousers, boys.” She tapped the photo with her fingertip. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Tyrell. You better be worth it.”

“I think you’ll find I’m worth my weight in gold,” he said, drawing the photo away from her and folding it into quarters. “Now, shall we take a look through the archive and see if we can’t find a match to your dead bloke?”

“Get on with it,” Pete agreed. Tyrell came from behind the counter and wound through the stacks toward a narrow back hallway. Lawrence began to follow him, but he shook his head.

“You’re too pure and bright to deal with the likes of me. The lady and I are in a bargain, not you.”

Lawrence flicked him off. “Where she goes, I’m goin’.”

Tyrell bared his teeth. “Then you’re not going far, are you, boyo?”

“It’s all right,” Pete said, to head off Tyrell getting a boot through his teeth. Lawrence growled in the back of his throat.

“You don’t know how far from all right this is.”

“Lawrence.” Pete felt a headache spring to life behind her eyes and tried to massage it away. “I know this isn’t what you’d do, but you do trust me, yeah?”

His jaw ticked, but he nodded. Pete leaned in, so Tyrell wouldn’t be privy. “Then trust I know what I’m doing. This isn’t my first shady old man in a dingy shop.”

“Jack ever heard about this, he’d wring my fuckin’ neck.” Lawrence sighed. “Anything happens, I’m in there.”

“At the very least, avenge my death,” Pete told him. She joined Tyrell and let him lead her into the back room. It wasn’t much, just a slant-roofed space that had once been a coal shed, filled to the rafters with paper mountains even more vertiginous than Jack’s. Pete’s boot clanked on something, and she saw a metal door, more of a hatch really, set into the floor.

“Tea?” Tyrell cleared papers away from a kettle encrusted with green minerals sitting on a burner that gave off a blue spark when he flicked the switch.

“No,” Pete said. Tyrell grunted as he rooted in the drawers of a narrow apothecary.

“Suit yourself. Tea makes it go down easier.”

“What?” Pete said, drawing back as far as she could without starting an avalanche of ancient books and papers onto her head. Smothered in circulars from before Churchill was in office was not the way she’d imagined kicking off.

Tyrell held up a small brown bottle. “You’re not a sensitive, am I right? You want a look at the archives, you take this.”

“Like Hell I’m drinking something out of a bottle some skeevy old man brandishes at me,” Pete said.

Tyrell coughed, or perhaps he was trying to laugh and not making much of a go. “My dear, you’re so generous.” He showed his teeth again. “Calling me a man.”

He busied himself finding a pair of cups and an ancient tin half-eaten by rust, measuring the tea into the strainer by hand. Pete felt her gaze slipping to the front of the shop. She’d lost sight of Lawrence, even though she could hear him rustling around and the sounds of the street outside. Not far at all, but she had the distinct feeling that if she made a break for the door, Tyrell would spring like a great insect and wrap his skinny limbs around her.

He wore his human skin poorly, as far as things disguising themselves as men went. It sagged around his face, and his hair was matted and greasy, as if he’d climbed inside a homeless man and hadn’t bothered to clean up. His eyes burned too bright, and whatever his real shape looked like hadn’t quite mastered blinking. Tyrell displaced just a little too much air for his size, the thing living under his skin larger than his concentration camp limbs and cavernous face.

“What should I call you instead?” Pete said.

“Whatever’s your pleasure.” Tyrell brushed his fingers against hers when he handed her the teacup and added a drop from his bottle.

“Don’t do that,” Pete warned. She sniffed the tea. It was gave off musty steam and smelled rather like the inside of a pensioner’s purse, but not like poison.

“I’ll do what I like,” Tyrell said, downing his own cup, sans potion. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me, desperately, and I don’t think you’re really in a position to boss me about.” He clinked his empty porcelain against Pete’s. “So drink up, Alice, and quit pretending you’re not quivering with anticipation.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said, and tossed the tea back in one long swallow. Tyrell banged his cup down.

“That’s the spirit. Give me a hand with this.” He wrenched at the wheel of the hatch in the floor and hauled the rusted, creaking thing free. Pete peered over the edge and saw a pitted metal ladder leading down into night.

“After you,” Tyrell said. Pete didn’t argue. He had her number—she didn’t have another bright idea if the Antiquarian wouldn’t help her. As she descended her center of gravity shifted, as if she’d passed through a sheet of running water. By the time her feet hit brick, she was seeing everything with a bleeding edge and hearing sounds down a long, convex tunnel.

“Dammit,” she said. Her own voice came across like a wax record, warped and tinny. “What did you give me, Tyrell?”

“Opened your eyes,” he said. When Pete looked at him from the corner of her vision, something much thinner and taller was in his place, and when she looked full on, he was the same grotty old man she’d cross the street to avoid.

“I asked for help, not … not this,” Pete said. She reached out, grabbed at chipped concrete. “Where the Hell are we?”

“Down the rabbit hole,” Tyrell said, and passed a hand across her neck with a chuckle. Pete felt claws, long multi-jointed fingers that could search through pages, or bones, with equal alacrity. An elongated jaw, yellow teeth made for slurping and grinding living flesh. Robes made from dirty grave winding cloth that concealed a body with more legs than two, with eyes that stared from between Tyrell’s rib bones, and soft insides that pulsed wetly behind an exoskeleton. Vast, unblinking hunger, but not for Pete. Tyrell wanted something much more, was trying to touch not her skin but the talent underneath, searching and seeking like a needle hunting a vein.

Pete became aware that she’d fallen over when she tasted blood from a cut cheek and felt the cool of brick against her face.

“See anything you like?” Tyrell crouched, and looked at her with his head twisted halfway round.

“What are you?” Pete mumbled, feeling her face. Wet on her fingers, but her nerve ends were blunted. Her face was completely numb. She remembered the few times she’d tried acid in school, how her dirty laundry in the hamper had turned into a crowd of black, flapping things and the paint had begun to bleed and reform on the walls of her room into scenes from MG’s tarot cards. That had been dreadful, and this was ten times worse.

“I told you,” Tyrell said. “I’m an Antiquarian.” He scuttled down the curved corridor ahead. Bare bulbs in cages hissed and spat above his head, and he stopped at a second metal door. “Coming?” he said, casting a look over his shoulder.

All right, Petunia, Pete said. Get your arse up. You’ve had worse.

She couldn’t remember when, but she got herself on her feet, and tried to ignore the ship’s-deck feeling of a bad trip rocking under her feet. “Where are we?” she said.

Tyrell pointed to a faded seal on the metal door. Pete saw it was from the War Office, decades out of date. It also kept moving, skating from one side of the door to the other. “Bomb shelter,” he said. “Thin here. Lots of fear, lots of people all shut up together, feeding off one another.” He spun the hatch. “A bit of the lost Black, for the lost library.”

“I can cross into the Black,” Pete insisted, knowing she sounded as if she’d drunk an entire pub’s worth of lager.

Tyrell extended his hand to pull her through the door. “Not like this.”

Pete ignored the gesture. Even wasted out of her skull, she knew better than to willingly touch Tyrell. She stepped through the hatch, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. The Black closed over her head, intractable as freezing water. Her head felt as if she’d left her skull floating a meter away, her brain flopping uselessly. The connection, to the currents and tides, was gone here. The Black was a bubble, trapped under glass, and Pete quivered under the psychic feedback.

“I do enjoy this place,” Tyrell said. “The world rushes to and fro, and the Black creeps into every crevice like tar, but here…” He inhaled, nostrils flaring white. “Here, it bends to the Antiquarians.”

Pete pressed a hand over her mouth, hoping the pressure would keep her together. Sweat chilled all over her bare skin.

“If you’re going to vomit,” Tyrell told her, “kindly do it in the corner and not near me.”

“This isn’t right…” Pete managed. All around her, the Black was screaming, rent open and bleeding magic into the void. She’d gotten sick the first time Jack had brought her over, but nothing like this. Something larger and more powerful than any single mage had torn a rip in the fabric of the Black here, and it was clinging to her mind, sinking in a million tiny needles that made all of her senses scream. For the Antiquarians to do such a thing, they were far worse than Lawrence had imagined. And she was here with them alone. Brilliant.

“Breathe,” Tyrell said, taking the folded photo from his vest with a clipped motion. “If I can stand it, so can you.”

Pete forced herself to focus on anything except her irregular heartbeat and the roar of the Black all around. The feeling wasn’t any worse than when they’d run suicide drills during her police training, back and forth in the rain and muck, until a cadet either passed out or chucked up their guts. “Hurry,” she mumbled at Tyrell, loathing the fact he’d made her beg. “Please.”

Tyrell pressed the photo to his lips, mumbled something Pete couldn’t understand, and then dropped it to the floor.

Blue flame crept in everywhere, over the walls, across the floor, through Tyrell’s hair, caressing his face and hands. Pete watched it raise the hairs on her arm, but she didn’t scream. It wasn’t really fire; it was power, bleeding out of the Black and into the physical realm. Jack could do the same trick.

Tyrell panted slightly, and while the witchfire crept over every surface, Pete felt more than saw something vast and fathomless open before her. This sliver of the Black bumped against another, connected, slippery as soap bubbles. “The archives say they know nothing,” Tyrell said presently. “I’m sorry, my dear.”

“Piss off,” Pete said. She could feel a bit of herself again, enough to know that she’d be miserable with bruises by the next day. If she even made it out here without her brain turning into cauliflower. “Try again.”

“I’m sorry.” Tyrell crumpled the photo between his fists. “The archives have spoken. If they don’t know, it’s not there to know.”

Pete pulled herself to her knees, and then, using the wall, stood up. She felt her knees wobbling, but she locked them and favored Tyrell with a glare. “People don’t just do this for a laugh. There’s a reason he’s dead.”

“Humans want to ascribe reason to everything,” Tyrell said. “It’s a failing of the breed.” He made for the door. “Our bargain is void, of course. I’m sorry that I, as an Antiquarian, could not be of service.” His awful caved-in mummy’s face composed itself into an expression that actually seemed contrite, but Pete pointed a finger at him.

“I’m desperate. You’re right. But I’m also not an idiot.” Her arm was too heavy to do anything but hang, so she let it. “You know something.”

Tyrell tugged at the door. “That’s odd.”

“Tell me,” Pete said. “Whatever it is. I can take it.”

“No, Miss Caldecott,” Tyrell snapped. “You can’t. Because you’re human, and like a human you will try to rush in and change things, push and shove them into your image of what the world should be.” He gave the door a kick. “Bastard thing. Enchantments are as dodgy as a knockoff watch.”

Pete inserted herself between Tyrell and the door, even though a fresh wave of dizziness crested and crashed over her. “Tell me,” she snarled. “I have even less patience than the average human, Tyrell.”

Tyrell worried his hands, nails clacking. “It’s not a death spell, all right? It’s not a spell at all. The carvings are Babylonian and a sort of necromancy, yes, but not in the narrow way you think. Not simply calling or repelling the dead. This thing that was done to this flesh—it has no order and no sense. It’s as if someone who didn’t speak the language wrote a book in Chinese, yeah? Nothing can come of it.”

“Clearly somebody thought different,” Pete said. The carvings had power. What she’d felt in the museum wasn’t simply psychic soot, deposited by the normal passage of the Black.

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t care. Antiquarians do not concern themselves in the affairs of the Black,” Tyrell said. “Far more pressing is the fact that I cannot open the door.”

Pete stared dumbly at him for a moment. “What?” It was certainly her day for asking obvious questions.

“The Black has been torn,” Tyrell said. “Shredded and remade, just now. It has pressurized us here, as if we were submerged deep under the ocean.” He shrugged. “Something massive is passing through, and we are feeling the ripples.”

Pete slid down the wall, until the floor of the small metal room met her bottom. “Dear lord. I’m going to die in here. With you.”

“It will pass,” Tyrell said. “These events are more regular than creatures like you realize. The Black is fragile and full of things that can cause such an event. Most are simply too old or too terrible for your kind to believe they still exist, or ever did. The wave will recede eventually.”

“How soon is eventually?” Pete said into her knees. Don’t panic, she ordered herself. Don’t breathe, don’t vomit, don’t lose your head. Easy to tell herself, hard to put into practice. The effects of Tyrell’s toxic tea were wearing off, and she was nauseated even without being trapped in a sliver of the Black she couldn’t access or escape on her own.

“Minutes,” Tyrell shrugged. “Decades.”

“I hate you,” Pete said.

Tyrell tested the door again. “Ah,” he said as it swung free. “Miss Caldecott.” He presented her a card with sleight of hand, a much cleaner and newer version of the one the long-ago Antiquarian had given Jack.

CURIOSITIES, the card read in bold script, and below it, MEMORY, ANTIQUITIES, & DREAMS, ALL TRADES CONSIDERED. The flip side contained the same gibberish chant.

“We’ll be in touch,” Tyrell said. “Good hunting, miss.”

The door slammed, and Pete was left alone to find her way back to the surface world.

CHAPTER 11

Pete bent double on the sidewalk outside the shop, breathing deep, trying to quell the roiling sickness in her guts.

“I ain’t a fan of sayin’ I told you,” Lawrence said. “But I did. That Antiquarian, he’s a no-good snake.” He rubbed a hand between Pete’s shoulder blades. “You gonna sick up?”

“Not if I can help it,” Pete mumbled, trying not to move her jaw. The passing posh crowd was casting increasingly alarmed looks, and it would only be a matter of time before someone called the police on the large black man and the skinny white woman acting as if she’d just come off a fortnight heroin binge.

“You get anything useful, at least?” Lawrence said. “Make this worthwhile?”

“Walk,” Pete said, even though the pavement looked as crumpled as velvet to her eyes. She grabbed Lawrence’s elbow, and they made their slow way down the high street. “Yes,” she said, when they’d left the stares behind. “Babylonian. Necromantic. Not a death spell. Beyond that, it was all a babbling brook of bullshit.”

“Antiquarians love bein’ smarter than you,” Lawrence agreed. “Smarmy cunts.”

Pete thought the rumbling that enveloped them, along with darkness, was her own blood in her ears for a moment, until Lawrence jerked her under the awning of a sweet shop. A moment later, a flashbulb went off across the entire sky and the heavens over London opened, pissing down cold spring rain that filled the gutters and caused a taxi to nearly jump the curb, wipers flailing madly against the windscreen.

“Just what we bloody need, eh?” Lawrence said. The thunder drowned out anything else, and nerves of lightning lit the skin of the iron-gray clouds that had collected in the space of a few footsteps.

“Never seen a storm like this,” Pete said.

“My old nana used to say a storm like this could wake the dead,” Lawrence said.

“I’m sure if your grandmother was aware of how annoying folksy wisdom is, she’d’ve kept that to herself,” Pete said.

“Oi,” Lawrence told her. “Just because you in the grumps doesn’t mean we all gotta be.”

The rain abated after a few more moments, not much but enough to run for the tube. The scarcity of people on the high street was the only reason Pete noticed the man all in black standing near a close, watching her from under the dripping brim of his wide hat. Pete tugged on Lawrence. “Hold it.”

Dreisden tipped his hat to Pete with a chipper grin, and turned and slipped away before she could take more than one step toward him. A taxi blared, and Lawrence jerked her back. “What’s the matter? Now you looked good and riled, in addition to wet and hungover.”

Pete glared at the spot where Dreisden had been, then dug in her bag for the card Juniper had handed her outside the Lament. “What’s the matter is I don’t like being fucking threatened.”

Lawrence didn’t answer, but he did follow her, which Pete didn’t argue with this time. She was through being menaced by Ethan Morningstar, and he’d pushed enough. If Lawrence could help her push back, so much the better.

The Order of the Malleus didn’t reside in any sort of posh modern flat near Canary Wharf, or a sinister, brooding Victorian narrow house watched over by iron gates crawling with ivy and Gothic sensibility. The address was on one of the side streets running up to the south side of Regent’s Park in Marylebone, a nondescript row house with a blue door and two small granite Chinese dogs guarding the steps.

Pete ignored the devil’s-head knocker, slamming on the wood with the flat of her hand. “Open this fucking door!” She used her best copper voice, and it rattled back from the row of flats opposite. Curtains twitched aside up and down the street.

Five seconds, then ten, then thirty went by without a response. “Oi!” Pete resorted to kicking, the steel of her boot leaving an ugly black wound in the door. “Morningstar! You know why I’m here, you creepy bastard!”

“Maybe we should … do something that isn’t this,” Lawrence suggested, from where he stood on the pavement. Pete cast around, then picked up one of the dog statues and walked back to the shiny black BMW parked in front of the row house. She swung hard and deliberate, letting the weight of the stone carry itself.

Windscreen glass exploded into the street, and the car’s alarm began to whoop. “Ethan,” Pete shouted. “Get your arse out here!”

The car alarm cut off, and the door of the house opened up. “Petunia Caldecott!” Her mother appeared on the stoop, arms crossed. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Pete tossed the statue aside. “Nothing that concerns you, Mother.” She pointed at the house. “I know he’s in there. What’s wrong, he can’t come himself? Has to send his overdressed rent boys to be the hard men?”

Juniper threw up her hands. “Oh, Petunia. You always had a flair for being overdramatic.”

“You’d know about dramatic entrances and exits,” Pete said. “Listen, Mum, you can prance about with these fuckwits all day long, but I want to talk to Ethan and I’m going to carry on smashing things that belong to him until he comes out.” She folded her arms. “Is that dramatic enough for your taste, Mother?”

“You’d think somebody nearly thirty would have learned not to be such a disagreeable little brat,” Juniper snapped, her serene Mother Superior composure finally wearing thin. Pete was gratified that she still had the temper that had caused her to bawl out MG for staying away all night and chuck the occasional lager bottle in Connor’s direction when he snapped at them once too often because of his job.

“It’s all right, Junie,” said a voice from the dark of the doorway. Morningstar appeared, a deal less imposing without the vampire coat and hat, but still with a glare and craggy hands that could crush Pete’s skull into shards. “We weren’t expecting you so soon, Miss Caldecott,” he said. His eye drifted to the smashed car and he sighed. “You know, you might have simply rung.”

Pete gave him a tight smile. “I don’t work for you, Ethan. We had this talk.”

Morningstar guided Juniper back over the threshold. “Go inside, dear.” He came into the street, picked up the statue, and set it back on its pedestal. “As I recall that conversation, we agreed you did want to do something for me, Miss Caldecott. If not for your sake than for your dear friends.” He tipped a salute to Lawrence. “Here’s one of them now.”

Lawrence made a move to Pete’s shoulder, but she waved him off. “He’s a bigot with fancy dress,” she told Lawrence. “This, I can handle.”

“Not him I’m worried about,” Lawrence muttered. “Your mum’s a lot scarier.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said, and mounted the steps. Morningstar gave her one of his knife-edged smiles.

“So kind of you to stop by.”

“Believe me,” Pete said. “I’m not having kind thoughts, Mr. Morningstar.”

“Ethan,” he said, shutting the door behind her. “Call me Ethan.”

Morningstar’s house was furnished in the same bland, vaguely classical style as the outside. Persian rugs muffling the floors, furniture with feet, and dour portraits of a man who looked like the genuine witch-burning article hanging in the front hall. Morningstar flicked a finger at one. “Sir Percival Morningstar, a several times great-grandfather of mine. Disposed of seven sorcerers in his day.”

“Must have been the toast of his inbred village,” Pete said acidly.

“I don’t hate you, you know,” Morningstar said gruffly. “Nor people like you.”

“Love the sinner?” Pete guessed.

“And burn the sin,” Morningstar agreed. He led Pete to the rear of the house, unlocking a door with a skeleton key he took from a ring in his pocket. “The Order of the Malleus is not what you think, Miss Caldecott. Despite your unfortunate first impression, we’re here to cure, not to torture. We kill as a last resort, to protect the Order.”

“Yes, well,” Pete said. “Some of us manage it without killing at all. ’M not going to pat you on the head.”

“How many people have you killed as a law officer?” Morningstar asked. “And how many do you think Mr. Winter caused the demise of before his misdeeds finally caught up with him?”

“We’ve been over this ground,” Pete said. “You found it full of pitfalls, remember?”

Morningstar gestured her through the open door but Pete balked. She wasn’t sure Morningstar wouldn’t simply shoot her in the back if she annoyed him excessively. “After you,” she said.

“Paranoia is an unfortunate side effect of magic on human brain tissue, you know.” Morningstar took a seat behind the sort of desk the headmaster of a snooty prep school would use. It suited him. Pete stood rather than use one of the straight-backed chairs facing Morningstar, as if she were a bloody truant. The office was surprisingly spare and far less grim than the rest of the Order’s house. One row of books paraded across the shelf behind Morningstar’s head, and an arty black and white of Hadrian’s Wall was the only decoration. Definitely a man’s office, a man spare and hard through all his deeds. Pete all at once didn’t feel so right about smashing his car.

“I’m careful,” she said. “And I learned that a long time before I admitted the Black was real.”

“Even so.” Morningstar put his feet on his desk. “The human mind was not meant to contain the energies of the Black. I strongly urge you to pull back before you do yourself permanent damage, Petunia.” Morningstar took a cigarette from a silver case at his elbow and lit it, but didn’t offer one to Pete.

“You’re one to talk about permanent damage,” Pete said, yanking Nasiri’s remaining photo from her bag and tossing it on Morningstar’s desk. “No need to send your boy, Ethan. I was coming for a chat anyway.”

“Oh?” Morningstar exhaled thin twin streams through his nose. “Regarding?”

“Let’s cut the shit, shall we?” Pete said. “Carver got killed working some nasty magic, yeah, but these cuts were made over years. And it wasn’t death magic being worked on him, it was something worse. He was arse deep in necromancy and you knew. What happened, Ethan? Did your dog break his chain?”

Ash grew on the end of Morningstar’s fag, forgotten. “You’ve learned a lot in a short time, Petunia. I’m impressed. But Gerard’s proclivities don’t concern you. He was one of us, sinner or not.”

“Did you know what he was doing?” Pete said. “Tell me the truth or I swear to your musty old god I’m going to break a lot more than your car.”

“I very much doubt that,” Morningstar said. Pete gritted her teeth. Morningstar didn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable that she was in his house. If anything, he appeared bored, smoking and loosening his tie as if she were a problem he wouldn’t have much trouble solving.

“I can’t help you if you won’t help me,” she tried.

Morningstar stubbed out his fag-end in a saucer. “I had an idea, yes. Gerard was a deep cover member of the Order. He had a talent. He had to use it occasionally. And necromancy … it’s seductive. So yes. I knew about his usage. What I don’t know is why he was killed, and that’s a concern. For you as well as for the Order.”

“I don’t mess with necromancers,” Pete said. “So really, I think I’m safe and sound.”

“All I want to do is help,” Morningstar said, slamming his hand down on the desk. Pete jumped. He stood, jabbing a fresh fag at her. “You, Gerard, everyone who’s gotten caught in the web. Who got tricked into believing in magic. You must get out before it burns you alive, Petunia. Your mother…”

“Leave my mother out of this,” Pete snarled. “You’ve already brainwashed her—is that not enough? You want the whole set of Caldecotts? I’ll have you ring up my sister, if that’s true. She’d let you sell her the Tower of London if you told her it was constructed by benevolent elves from outer space.”

“Goddamn it, this is not a fucking joke to me!” Morningstar bellowed. “I’m saving the good people of the world. They may not see it, but in the end, they get on their knees and thank me in their prayers.”

“Please,” Pete said. She turned to leave, because being ignored wore on men like Morningstar a thousand times more than defiance. “Preach it to someone who doesn’t know what’s really out there in the dark.”

“You think I don’t know?” Morningstar said. “You think I’m a fanatic who condemns from the outside?” He sank back into his chair, and jabbed out the cigarette viciously. “I’ve seen, Miss Caldecott. I’ve seen…” He ran a hand down his face. “My sister’s name was Charity. Even though we were brought up God fearing, magic denouncing, as all members of the Order should be, Charity fell in with the Black. Through our research, she met them. The mages and the sorcerers, the unclean things that crawl below the skin of this city, and she fell…” Morningstar’s jaw twitched. “She died. Nearly thirty years gone, now. I spent nights down there, looking for her.” He shook his head. “She still slipped away. I knew enough about necromancy to bring her back, Miss Caldecott. But I didn’t. I redoubled my dedication, and I found the lost souls when I could, and led them to the light. And that’s why, when I found Gerard Carver, I knew I had to save him. And when he died, I knew that something terrible was stirring in the Black. Because I know my enemy, Petunia, and I know that we’ve precious little time left to stop him. Can you say the same? About anything?”

Pete hadn’t expected a bastard like Ethan Morningstar, with a view narrower than a chimneysweep’s arse and sermons to match, to ever make her feel like shite. Still, she felt her stomach tie in knots as he stared at her, waiting for her reply. She thought about all of the nights looking for Jack in his various drug squats, the hellish week when he’d been detoxing, and knowledge ever after that he was one bad day or bad vision or Hell, stubbed toe away from using again, and she’d have to do it all over. There was never any question of whether she’d go after him when he slipped back down into the Black. She had to. Jack was the one thing she could never be clean of.

“Gerard Carver didn’t deserve what happened to him,” she said. “But he was into some nasty fucking magic, and it’s going to take some time to unravel it all. Meanwhile, may I suggest you stop following me and stop making these little chats necessary?”

Morningstar scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “I assure you, Mr. Dreisden was there for your protection. I meant what I said. The Black is out of balance, and what information Gerard passed me was troubling. Necromantic rituals that haven’t been used since before Christ, cropping up again. Horrible stuff. Feisty as you are, Petunia, it would eat you alive.”

All at once, Pete saw Morningstar with perfect clarity. Perhaps it was the absence of the Black at last, after the oppressive weight of the lost library. With her senses quiet, she saw Morningstar as a man past his prime, exhausted furrows writ into a face that was really too young to hold them, at least so deeply. Back bent from stemming a tide he knew would surely drown him, with the next wave, or the hundredth—it was only time, as his strength ebbed and the Black continued to flow just as it always had.

“I’m not doing this for you,” Pete said. “Let’s just get that straight. I’m doing it so you’ll leave me and mine alone. Permanently.”

Morningstar lit his second fag. “I’m going to be honest with you, Miss Caldecott: We’ve been seeking you out ever since you sought the company of Jack Winter, what is it, two years ago now?”

“It was two years,” Pete agreed softly. “Just about.”

“Like I said,” Ethan sighed. “We are not ignorant to the movements of the Black. You have a prodigious talent, and you could use it to do so much good.”

“All due respect, Ethan,” she said. “I’m doing good. You and your Order are doing precisely shite that I can see but sit around wringing your hands.” She opened the door to the main hall. “I can see myself out.”

“This mystery spell that killed Gerard,” Ethan said, wagon-wheel voice serving to stop Pete in her tracks. “Wouldn’t happen to be Babylonian, would it?”

Pete knew she’d gone stiff, from the pang in her shoulder where she’d landed on it badly years ago, chasing a shoplifter along the Camden locks. “How did you know that?” She had to be careful. She was alone with Morningstar, a big man with a gun who wasn’t afraid of or even adverse to violence. If she accused him of having a bit more of a hard-on for spellcraft than was officially accepted by an upright outfit like the Order, she had no doubt Morningstar would put her through the nearest wall.

“Wipe that look off your face,” Morningstar said. “I told you. It’s a sign.”

Pete stayed still, but she did him the grace of turning around and not saying anything snide. There was a window behind Morningstar, but it only faced the brick of the next house. She probably couldn’t break the glass without a running start. The front door was far away. At least Lawrence would eventually call Ollie if she didn’t come back out.

“A time ago, when I was searching for Charity, I happened across a book.” Morningstar produced a key and used it to open a small compartment in the wall. He pulled out a small volume and opened it with great care. “It was just a scribbling, a transcription of a Babylonian grimoire that some speed-addled mage had set down while he was high and touching the face of Ishtar,” Morningstar murmured. “But I know it’s the truth. Thirty years, Miss Caldecott. I’ve built my life around this page, right here.”

“Brilliant,” Pete said. “Care to share so I can get on with my day?”

“The serpent winds the world,” Morningstar read. His voice was so soft that Pete had to step closer to hear it, overshadowed by a ticking clock and someone moving about in another part of the house. “The serpent devours the world. The bone gods dance in dreaming. The serpent becomes the world.”

Morningstar shut the book and placed his hand on the cover. “Nearly three thousand years ago, someone in Babylon predicted the end of days, Miss Caldecott. And it’s here. It’s all around us. And you—you’re right here. With us.”

Pete found her mouth was dry when she tried to speak. “That doesn’t mean anything. There’s hundreds of prophecies back in my flat, in Jack’s books. You can set about as much stock by them as by some bloke on a street corner yelling about the lizard men.”

“It’s true,” Morningstar said, “and some part of you believes it, or you wouldn’t have come straight here.”

“I came here because you’re irritating me,” Pete said. “And I’m working the Carver thing because I have to. You or any of your trenchcoat brigade come at me again, and I will take it personally. You read me?”

“You’re going to get in over your head unless you let me help you,” Morningstar insisted. “And for that, you need to accept the truth of those words.”

Pete jabbed a finger into Ethan’s chest when he got inside her personal bubble and tried to do the soothing hand-on-the-shoulder move favored by teachers wanting too badly to be liked and perverted older men playing on daddy issues.

“I don’t need protection,” she said. “I’m not a shy baby bird left helpless because I don’t have the great Jack Winter watching me. I don’t need another set of minders. And if I did, your psychotic mouth-breather brigade would be the very last I’d ask.”

Deciding she’d probably said enough to cause Morningstar to want her dead, even if he hadn’t before, Pete turned around and left.

“Petunia, I’m serious…” Morningstar started, but she held two fingers over her head.

“Sod off, Ethan!” She slammed the front door on him, cutting off the oppressive silence of the Order’s headquarters for the buzz and hum of the street.

CHAPTER 12

Ollie rang just as Pete was running a bath, and she shut off the water, sitting on the edge of the tub. “Yeah, Ollie?”

She unlaced her boots, cradling the phone and letting the steel toes thump to the tile.

“Tell me you have something for me,” Ollie muttered. He sounded as if he were muffling the phone. The gentle hum of the incident room was missing, and Pete heard water trickling.

“Ollie, are you in the loo?”

“Newell found out,” Ollie said. “Tore me up one side and down the other. Pete, just tell me you found something before I’m out on my arse and back in Yorkshire, writing traffic citations to combine harvesters.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. She peeled off her damp, sweat-encrusted blouse, trousers, and bra while swapping Ollie to speaker. Her head had begun to throb as soon as she left the Order’s house, but she’d braved it until she was in the flat and could ride out the hallucinogenic hangover in peace. Her cheek was cut deeper than she’d thought, and blood had trickled down her jaw on the tube. On the upside, she’d gotten an entire bench on the Hammersmith & City train to herself. Hospital was out of the question, but she’d need to at least glue it shut if she didn’t want to look like she’d been attacked by a werewolf. “Shit,” she muttered as fresh blood oozed down her cheek when she prodded.

“You found shit?” Ollie barked. “Pete, don’t bloody do this to me!”

“Wasn’t talking to you, was I?” Pete sighed. “Look, the markings on Carver weren’t a killing spell, they were some musty old Babylonian ritual, and I haven’t found much else yet. That bit mean anything?”

“Might,” Ollie said. “Carver worked with Babylonian and Egyptian antiquities. If it was within a thousand miles of the Fertile Crescent, he had his paws on it, is the word from his boss. And we’ve found some irregularities with his customs manifests, now that the tech wanks have poked a bit. Seems old Gerard wasn’t so squeaky as he appeared. May have even been selling off odd bits of history on the side. His mum has a very nice little terrace for a pensioner who thinks her next door neighbor is a German spy.”

“I’d really love to get another look at the room he died in,” Pete said. “I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble to carve someone up, wouldn’t you do it in private? Why dump him like an exhibit, unless it meant something to you?”

“I might be able to get the curator to let us have another go,” Ollie said. “Assuming Newell doesn’t fire me when I get back from taking a piss. Can you meet at the museum after closing hours?”

Pete gave up trying to stanch the gash with a washcloth and reached into the cabinet for peroxide. “Yeah. Around eight?”

“Eight it is,” Ollie said. “And you better pull a rabbit out of your hat that sings fucking Morrissey, because Newell is apoplectic.”

“No pressure for me to have some sort of clever day-saving plan, then,” Pete muttered.

“You’re tops,” Ollie said. “Cheers.”

“Fuck you,” Pete told him, but he’d already rung off. She tossed her mobile and went into the bedroom to retrieve Jack’s half-arsed first aid kit, which consisted of a crumbled box of Band-Aids, gauze, Super Glue, and a fifth of whiskey.

Daubing the wound with antiseptic was the worst part, although she supposed she could count herself lucky that it was real peroxide solution and not something cheap and ninety-proof that Jack had pulled out of some dank cabinet in his terrifying excuse for a kitchen.

Pete hissed as the blood stained a collection of cotton wool pink. She irrigated the wound with a bit of contact lens solution—poor man’s saline—and dabbed Super Glue along the lower edge, careful to keep it off her fingertips. Once the skin had knit, she slapped on a piece of surgical tape and took a quick gulp from the whiskey bottle before shoving the whole mess out of sight under the basin.

She’d gone her entire Met career without being stabbed, and it wasn’t until she’d seen Jack again that grievous bodily harm became the order of the day. This wasn’t a bad wound, but it was a bad reminder of both how lucky and how completely stupid she’d been, drinking down the Antiquarian’s potion and diving into the whole Carver mess, necromancers leaving corpses strewn all over the city and Carver’s living friends itching to shove her soul in a box for their tally.

Jack would have been smart. He’d have found a way out of both ends of this by now, and he didn’t need any sodding poison tea to open his third eye. This was Jack’s life. Pete slipped into a nightgown hanging on the door of the loo and then went into the bedroom and let herself drop onto the mattress, boneless. Jack’s life. But she the one left living it. Pete had no idea how that was fucking fair, but there it was.

Her nightgown was another of Jack’s shirts, soft from wear and washing until it was nearly transparent. She’d run it through the laundry, but the fabric still smelled faintly of him. Whiskey, cigarettes, and sweat. Jack, in one breath. Pete was relieved she was too tired to have to stop herself from crying, and that her mind was too cluttered to relive the touch of Jack’s hands against her bare skin. She curled up on the mattress, pulling the blankets over her head to shut out the daylight, and was asleep before she even realized she was falling.

CHAPTER 13

Ollie met Pete at the freight entrance to the British Museum, and together they walked through the back hallways to the silent, dark exhibits. The head curator, boss of Carver’s boss, was a little woman named Matthews who giggled at everything Ollie said whether it was funny or not. She led them to Gerard Carver’s office, buried deep back in the maze of the museum not open to the public. It was a shabby little office that fit the shabby little man Carver had been in life. Pete shifted the journals and printouts around a bit, seeing if she could catch a glimpse of either of his other lives—fanatic witchfinder or sleazy necromancer—until Matthews cleared her throat and drew her bushy brows together.

“Sorry,” Ollie told her. “Miss Caldecott sometimes forgets where she is.”

“As I was telling you on the telephone,” Matthews said. “Now that we’ve examined the manifests Mr. Carver signed for more carefully, there are several glaring inconsistencies. It’s terrible. Really terrible. All of our employees pass a thorough background check.”

“You think he was sellin’ the stuff?” Ollie said. Matthews put a hand to the collar of her fuzzy pink jumper, as if Ollie had asked what her sign was.

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, Chief Inspector. I don’t deal on the black market. I believe antiquities are for the world to appreciate, and they should be preserved.”

“And nothing says preservation like hacking them off the side of the Pantheon, does it?” Pete said, shoving another stack of magazines just to take the piss.

“The museum does a service for the entire world,” Matthews snapped. “Our methods were not always sound but we take the greater good into consideration, and if Gerard was selling these items to private collectors, then he’s violated the most sacred trust a curator is given.”

“It’s just Inspector,” Ollie injected. “I’m a DI. Can you account for what’s missing?”

“Oh, yes.” Matthews brandished a printout as if she’d been challenged to a duel. “Here’s a complete list. Five items, mostly Babylonian funerary items. Nothing that was terribly valuable, which is how they were overlooked. Gerard signed them out for cleaning and simply never signed them back in.”

Ollie skimmed the list and then handed it off to Pete. The manifests contained a few lines of description, a log of the object’s activity once it entered the museum, and who’d signed it out. “Idols?” she said.

“Oh my, yes,” said Matthews. “The Babylonians in particular attached enormous importance to their idols. They believed their gods and heroes resided simultaneously in their stone and ethereal form. Great care was taken with them.”

Pete pointed to the last item. “And this?”

“A jar, I believe,” said Matthews. “Just a household item but very nice. We would have used it for the rotating exhibits—life in the Bronze Age, you know. The sort of thing schoolchildren enjoy.”

“Yeah,” Ollie said. “Always liked that, at school. We got to go to a recreated Roman village once. Thought that was tops when I was a kid.”

“The jar was the last thing to go missing,” Pete told him. Carver had signed it out one day before his death, in fact, and hadn’t bothered to jot down an excuse.

“Maybe he fancied it,” Matthews said. “You do get attached to your objects, as a curator. They’re pieces of the world, the bones of history that we build on. You see?”

“Think I’d rather have a cat,” Pete told her. “You got a picture?” If Carver was stealing antiquities, Pete would lay even money that it was only partially to fund his side activities of fiddling with the dead. Magic objects had a way of slipping between the cracks, turning up in junk shops and attics, until someone with the right radar happened on them. Jack’s flat was a prime example.

“Somewhere in the database, of course,” Matthews agreed. “I’ll have to look it up via inventory number and then I could mail it to DI Heath, if he’d be so kind as to give me his e-mail address.”

Ollie cleared his throat and scribbled on the back of one of his cards before handing it over.

“How lovely,” Matthews beamed. “I’ll do it straightaway in the morning. Now I’m afraid I must be going—I don’t care to be walking the streets after nine p.m. It’s not safe. Of course you understand.”

“It’s a veritable Wild West out there in darkest Bloomsbury,” Ollie said. Matthews batted her pale eyelashes at him once more before taking her leave. Ollie started to follow, but Pete caught him and shook her head. She pointed down the hallway to the public area.

“I’d like to get one more look,” she said. “See if I can’t figure out why they left him there.”

“Just make sure that bloody woman doesn’t pop ’round the corner,” Ollie muttered, beating a hasty retreat after her.

“You going to take her out, then?” Pete said. “I bet her knickers match her jumper.”

“Fuck off,” Ollie told her. “You think you could have slagged her off any more? She’s a witness, and I have to deal with her now.”

“I think one look at that chiseled jawline and manly chest you’re sporting and she’ll forgive you anything, Chief Inspector Heath,” Pete said.

“You’re a horrid person and you’re going straight to Hell,” Ollie informed her.

Pete didn’t really feel her good humor, but she allowed herself to punch Ollie on the shoulder rather than cringe. Being with Ollie was a good distraction—she could fall back into their familiar rhythms and not think about necromancers, the Order, or her bloody mother.

She got out her pocket torch when they reached the Egyptian Room, a cavern of shadow on shadow in the faint light coming from the outside. The floor had been scrubbed clean, a scrape of roughness under her boot the only sign that blood had lain there long enough to soak into the marble. The leaking power from around Carver’s body had gone, but she could still feel the threads of magic here—worn and frayed, drifting among the artifacts, and more recent, sharp and grasping, like a nest of thorny vines.

“Why here?” she said, flashing her light over Ramses II. Ollie scratched at his temple.

“Psychiatrist would say he’s making a statement, wouldn’t they? Telling us something from dumping the poor git here.”

“Or he’s bragging,” Pete said. We know where you sleep and work. Even here, among the oldest magic on earth, you’re not safe.

“Or he’s a lazy sod who couldn’t be arsed to drag the body the rest of the way down to the trash compactor,” Ollie said.

Pete clicked the light off. “Thought maybe this would make one of us clever.”

“Clever’s your bit,” Ollie said. Pete looked down at the spot where Carver had lain. In the dark, it was easy to imagine his slumped shape, imagine whoever had dragged him here, tugged on his hair to bare his throat, and done him in with one clean slash.

And then … tossed the knife in the bin and fucked off down the pub?

“Ollie, did the security tapes get anything?” Pete said. He snorted.

“You think I’d still be here if we’d caught anything on CCTV?” He gestured at the corners of the room. “State of the art, but someone using Carver’s login shut ’em off through the mainframe. Fancy stuff. Security guard who found the body said he’d heard noises—you know, our old friend, suspicious sounds. Beyond that, whatever he was up to in here before he died is between him and his god.”

Pete thought of the bloody marks on Carver’s torso, fresh and red and dripping when Nasiri pulled his shirt aside. “He was there,” she told Ollie.

“Yeah,” he said. “Wait. Who?”

“The Pope. The guy who did Carver, Ollie.” Pete scuffed her toe across the spot. “Carver killed the cameras because Carver wasn’t expecting to die. He was expecting to carve himself up and do a ritual, sure, but I’m thinking he found out that a human sacrifice was the bonus behind the curtain.”

“And that didn’t sit well, so he kicked up a fuss,” Ollie said, looking toward the main lobby of the museum. “The guard interrupted ’em.”

“It’s not finished,” Pete said. “Whatever Carver was doing, it’s not finished.”

“Good, I think,” Ollie said. “Trying to work dodgy spells amid a bunch of mummies never ends well in those programs where the girl kicks high and stakes the vampires.”

“Not good,” Pete said. “Because if they didn’t finish with Carver, they’re going to finish it with someone else.”

Carver hadn’t been working death magic because he hadn’t expected to die. But any spell worked in flesh and carried out with funerary relics wasn’t something that was going to cause pink unicorns and toffees to rain from the sky. “I think we need to look at Carver’s house,” Pete said. “And I think I need to find out who his friends were off the clock.”

“You can’t come along to his house,” Ollie said. “Newell will shit his own testicles. But if you were to take it upon yourself, as a good citizen of my fair city, to make discreet inquiries, well. I’d be obligated to follow any leads, as an officer of the law.”

“Cheers,” Pete said. Ollie started to reply, but his mobile went.

“Heath,” he grumbled. Then, his breath hitched, and Pete’s stomach twinged. She knew the pause, knew the slack absence of expression that caused Ollie’s jowls to bag. She saw it in more than enough faces to memorize during her Met days, when she appeared on doorsteps, delivering bad news.

“Where?” Ollie bit out. “Fucking when?” A few seconds of silence and then, “Right. I’m coming now.”

“What is it?” Pete said. Ollie’s face was blank as she’d ever seen it, and he gripped his mobile in his fist so that it chirped as his grip mashed the buttons. “Ollie,” Pete said, running to keep up with his broad stride. “What’s happened?”

Ollie breathed in, out, and then stopped, pressing his forehead against the corridor wall. “McCorkle,” he said. “He’s dead.”

CHAPTER 14

Ollie didn’t ask Pete to come with him, but he didn’t say anything to the contrary when she followed him to his Vauxhall. Ollie didn’t say anything, full stop, until they were over the river and heading into the crawling ant-farm roads of South London.

“Said his landlady found him. Christ, his fucking landlady. Not even a girlfriend … Hell, boyfriend. Not even me.”

“Ollie,” Pete said, watching his meaty hands turn pink and white as he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to dent it. “This is not your fault.”

“He was my partner,” Ollie said. “I was meant to be looking out for him.”

“We don’t know the details,” Pete said. “Could have been anything. Could have slipped in the loo, completely accidentally.” Of course, the officers from Ollie’s own station, miles from the crime scene, wouldn’t be calling him if that were the case. Accidents that happened to coppers who worked CID, especially on an MIT, weren’t even always accidents. Connor had written off a few suicides in his day, gun-cleaning incidents, slip and falls, that sort of thing. Pete knew it and Ollie knew it, but offering him a ray of hope was just the thing to do.

McCorkle lived in Brixton, and Ollie crawled along Coldharbour Lane, past a mom-and-pop market and a pub, a café with its gate down for the night, and an upscale vintage shop.

“Place has changed a lot,” Pete said, to say something. Sitting with Ollie and yet being completely silent wasn’t natural. “My dad was in the ’81 riot, you know. First year on the job as a PC.” Ollie didn’t tell her to shut up, so she kept on as lights from patrol cars flared in the distance, gathered outside a pair of Victorian homes that had been chopped into flats, estate agent’s sign still hanging in a front window. “Never talked about it much. Imagine it bothered him, being an Irish kid forced to smash other kids with a truncheon unless he wanted to be done in himself. Think it put him off the job forever, in a way. He was never the kind of copper who talked about being the line, acted as if he were doing some great service.”

Ollie parked illegally near the phalanx of uniformed officers milling outside McCorkle’s flat, smaller bodies orbiting the two marked cars and the ambulance. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Pete waited a respectful thirty seconds, until Ollie had found a plod who seemed to at least have enough brain cells to give him relevant details, before she joined him on the pavement. “What’s going on?”

“Trying to determine that myself,” Ollie said, hands twitching like he wished they were around the plod’s neck. “Listen, you—either let me in there or I’m walking over you. No real decision on your part.”

“Heath?” A tall figure wrapped in a blue coat cut through the uniforms and came to Ollie’s side. He was as trim as Ollie was wide, and together they cut an odd pair, even more so given the new bloke’s immaculate navy suit and shined shoes, even at the late hour. Dark curls slicked back from a high forehead, exposing delicate features, but Pete wouldn’t have crossed him. This one walked like the coppers Connor had detested—as if he were the sheriff of all he surveyed, protecting the villagers from the wolves.

“Who the fuck,” Ollie said, summing up Pete’s feelings, “are you?”

“DS Patel, from Lambeth,” the tall detective said, extending a hand. “I caught your man’s call-out.”

Ollie ignore the hand, so Patel turned it to Pete. “You’re Petunia Caldecott,” he said, snapping it back to his side when he recognized her. Pete was so used to the reaction from cops she barely let it rile her. Patel frowned. “Heard you went Section 8.”

“Do I look like I’m bloody Section 8?” Pete demanded. Patel considered, tilting his head.

“Felix Patel,” he said finally. “Pleasure’s all mine. I trust you’ll be fine to wait here while I allow DI Heath a look at the scene. Ask one of the plods to bring you a cup of tea.”

Pete opened her mouth, but she would have been speaking to air. Patel had already measured and dismissed her. His eyes were back on Ollie. “It’s bad, Heath,” he said. “I’m sorry to say it. Very bad.”

“I’ve worked MIT,” Ollie grumbled. “I can take it.”

“It’s not a murder,” Patel said, gently as he could. Pete watched Ollie’s face go from bulldoggish to kicked in the space of a breath.

“You sure you’re ready?” Patel said, putting a hand on Ollie’s shoulder. Ollie tucked his chin down into his collar, a gladiator tucking into armor and preparing to take a bad hit, and glared at the spot where Patel touched him. “Right,” Patel said. “Come along.”

“I’m coming,” Pete said. She moved to Ollie’s shoulder, so he could feel her there.

“You’re not a DI any more,” Patel said. “And even if you were, you’ve no jurisdiction on this side of the river. I’m doing DI Heath a courtesy for his partner’s sake.”

“For fuck’s sake, Patel.” Ollie’s voice was rough, echoing off the concrete entryway of the flat block. “She’s likely a Hell of a lot more well trained than your fresh-faced schoolboys here.”

Patel locked eyes with Pete for a moment, and she stared back, unblinking. She got it—Patel was a DS, probably looking to make his name. A cop suicide was a dodgy enough matter. If he let the Section 8 former DI wander around his scene, his halo would aquire a little tarnish.

Patel surprised her, though, by sneering and then nodding. He led them up the steps of the Victorian on the left, up another set on the inside, to the top floor. McCorkle’s flat was the entire attic, the grand house carved up into smaller spaces on the cheap. Fresh plaster hit Pete’s nose when they crested the stairs. McCorkle’s door stood open as the white moonsuited figures of crime scene techs went about their business within his living space.

Former living space. McCorkle wasn’t living there any longer, at least in his own skin. The moment Pete came within a few feet of his door, though, she could tell that something was still very much present in McCorkle’s flat. It started as vague unease, prickles like she felt before a storm broke over the city, all of the ions in the air cycling against her skin, and the pressure got faster and stronger as Patel lifted the tape for Heath, speaking to the crime scene unit but paying her no mind. Pete scrubbed at her forehead. She was just bruised a bit on her sixth sense, that was all. First the Hecate and then the lost library. She was uneasy being here, in the remains of the life of a man she hadn’t liked much in the first place. That was why she felt fingers on skin, the lightest of touches on her other senses, whispers through the Black just out of her hearing.

Patel stopped her at the tape and gripped her arm hard with a set of pincer-like fingers. “You touch anything, say anything—you sneeze while you’re inside this room—and you will need a team of specialists flown in from Norway to remove my boot from your arse.”

Pete looked at his hand on her, back at him, hoping the suggestion he should mind his personal fucking space came across clearly in her withering glare. “Don’t you worry, DS. I leave the brilliant deductions to Batman.”

“I know all about you,” Patel said, low. “None of that psychic bullshit, gone to a better place, messages from the back of beyond here. Heath’s lost his man and doesn’t deserve that.”

“I’ve got a message for you,” Pete said. “I know Ollie far too well to think he’d ever believe that shite, never mind want it. Now get your fucking hand off me or I’m not going to fucking smile about it.”

Patel grimaced, an abortion of the smug smile he’d no doubt been saving for the grand finale of Pete’s place-putting. “Heard about your temper. Figured they exaggerated.”

“Absolutely,” Pete agreed, as he let go of her. “Sweet as custard cake, me.” She didn’t pick up an impression from Patel, just a general sharpness, like he’d been made of metal and sealed off. Jack had said some blokes had more natural defenses against magic than others—the uber-normal, as it were. That was probably just as well. Patel wouldn’t embarrass McCorkle and by extension Ollie. He’d close it up quiet and quick, all the loose ends accounted for and the right paperwork filed, and the legend of Freddy McCorkle would become a ghost story to tell at closing hour down the pub.

“Oliver,” Patel said, at once all conciliatory smiles and low, soothing tones. “Let me take you through the timeline.”

Pete didn’t need the narration of Patel’s clipped private school accent. The blood told the story, and there was enough of it to paint every inch of her skin.

McCorkle’s body was in the center of the flat’s tight sitting area. The crime scene techs had put a plastic sheet over it, but one hand protruded, fingers splayed like a flower. A few inches away rested the kind of short, blunt all-purpose kitchen blade that held a serrated edge, also painted with blood spatter.

The biggest pool of blood was under the corpse, but an arterial spray had hit McCorkle’s sofa and dribbled down the front of his flat-screen telly, which was still playing a rerun of an international match between two countries whose flags Pete didn’t recognize.

“TV was on when first responders arrived,” said Patel. “Landlady came up to ask him to turn it down. She claims she didn’t touch anything, but, well…” Patel shrugged. “You know how little old women can be.”

Patel knelt down and twitched back the sheet. Pete saw Ollie flinch, but he hid it after a split second, his impassive, cowlike nonexpression in place. “One cut,” Patel said. “Pulled the knife all the way across before he passed out. Hit the carotid. I know it’s probably not a comfort, but he didn’t feel it for long.”

Ollie passed a hand over his face. “Forced entry. Something. Freddy wouldn’t just … wouldn’t just…”

“Not that we can see,” Patel said. “Of course, building’s not secure, and it is Brixton. But no, he’s been alone all evening according to his landlady. This was … this is unfortunate, Heath. I’m sorry.”

“I called him a twat,” Ollie said. “He’d misfiled some papers on the case we were working.”

“Heath, you really can’t look for blame or reasons in this sort of thing,” Patel said. “Trust me. It’ll drive you around the bend.”

Pete watched as Ollie visibly reined himself in, pulled up his spine, got back into the skin of the unflappable copper. “He wasn’t depressed, since I know you’ll ask. Wasn’t anything, really. Didn’t socialize much, always rushing off end of shift. I thought he had a girlfriend, or maybe he was gay and he didn’t want his new nick finding out…” Ollie hunched again, took a breath, and deliberately turned his back on the corpse. “I don’t know why this happened.”

“Can be anything,” Patel said. It was a line, but Pete was glad Ollie was too far gone to see that. “Don’t blame yourself, Heath.” He carried on with his guided tour of the scene, Ollie moving with jerky, numb motions beside him.

Pete turned her back on them, once Patel’s eyes were off her. The thread was still there, the tremble through the Black. McCorkle’s flat telescoped into a claustrophobic hallway that peaked into an A shape as the builders ran out of room next to the roof, closet on one side, bedroom and en suite on the other. The bedroom was still neat, free of blood, the bed crumpled on one side with a dent from McCorkle’s head still in his pillow.

Above the bed was a giant print, one of the generic street scenes of Paris you could buy from an IKEA, and the whispers in Pete’s mind rose to shrieks, from a great distance, across a vast and windy plain.

Not bothering with her shoes, Pete climbed onto the bed and grabbed the print by the edges, lifting it off the hook.

The blood was fresh enough that it gleamed in the low bedroom light, and it had dribbled down McCorkle’s bland coffee-colored walls in slow rivulets. The lettering was a bit bigger than Pete’s hand and she nearly fell at the onslaught of black magic on her senses. The message, though, was a simple one.

THE SERPENT BECOMES THE WORLD

CHAPTER 15

Patel was less than pleased with Pete’s discovery. In fact, she’d wager she’d never seen a detective from the Met get quite so volcanic, quite so quickly. She could still hear him cursing at Ollie in the other room, shouting at what a mess this was, since clearly he didn’t get up again after slitting his own throat and write us a fucking note. A uniform watched Pete with the stern glare of a young but earnest schoolteacher.

“Oh, calm down,” Pete told the plod. “Be grateful he’s not screaming at you, just because he can.”

“He’s a twat,” the officer said, clearly desperate for a sympathetic third party to relay that bit of information to. “Nearly got me fired last month because I had to go take a piss and left my partner alone at a perimeter.”

Pete looked back at the letters in McCorkle’s blood. She’d ended up here as a favor to Ollie, and the simple hope that if she tried hard enough to move on, to finish a job and find a bad apple without Jack, she’d be able to actually do it. To have closure.

But now … now they’d made it personal, and they’d killed someone to do it. Jack would never have let it go this far. He would have known what he was looking at the moment Carver’s body turned up in the museum. Wouldn’t have thrashed around in the dark for days and let McCorkle end up skewered. It had to be her fault. The necromancers who’d nearly happened on her at Wapping had decided to take a more direct route and reach her and Heath in one swift stroke. We know where you live. Even here, in the bosom of your copper’s sanctuary, you are not safe.

“You all right, miss?” said the constable. “Stuffy in here, ain’t it?”

“I’d murder a glass of water,” Pete said. “Could you be a love? If I go out there I think Patel’s liable to rip off my face and spit down my neck.”

The constable snorted a phglemy laugh. “Sure, miss. You wait here like he said though, yeah? I need this job.”

Pete sighed. If this was the caliber of soul populating the new, young Met, the criminal underworld should be throwing a fucking soirée.

As soon as the constable vanished into the en suite, Pete went for McCorkle’s drawers. She could explain McCorkle topping himself, miserable bastard that he’d been, but not the writing—word for word what Morningstar had read to her from his bloody book, hidden in a place that the crime scene techs wouldn’t have found for days, if not weeks—plenty of time for McCorkle to be filed as a suicide and the file to be pushed to the bottom of Patel’s pile. Plus there was the small matter of whoever had orchestrated this little abattoir choosing McCorkle in the first place. He had no history with occult crimes and even less history with the Black.

Morningstar could conceivably have had time to do it—he could have sent Dreisden and his razor after McCorkle—but she’d been in his study, within strangling distance, and he’d let her walk out again. Besides, Morningstar wasn’t about knives in the back. He was a shock-and-awe type, assaulting the wicked with the righteous fury of his own self-importance.

And neither Morningstar nor the Order explained the black magic. The necromancer who’d gone after McCorkle wanted something from her, had practically painted her name on the wall along with the phrase.

Pete didn’t put stock in prophecies, and for all she knew the phrase about the serpent was as well-known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” among necromancers. There was a plethora of serpents in Revelation, even, the fan fiction of religious texts: And the dragon fought and his angels. Slithery things were all over magic texts, from Babylon to the Golden Dawn. But if the necromancer was reaching out to her with the tip of his blade, then what, exactly, was the message Pete was supposed to receive?

Jack would know. Pete tossed the drawers faster, hearing the water shut off and the constable begin his plodding return to the room. Jack would know, which was no bloody help to her, because the necromancer hadn’t reached for Jack. He’d reached for her.

The power in the flat was still up. Small ice picks in the base of her skull told Pete that magic was here, and her talent whispered to her to let it in. It would fill her up, consume her, drown her in power, but what a sweet death it would be, suffused with all the power the Black had to offer. Pete bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard. Pain could usually pull her back when things threatened to get hazy, and she yanked open the last door, hearing Patel snap a question at the plod and the plod answer—Just wanted a cup of water.

She’s a fucking menace and it’s a murder scene now, Constable. Get back in there.

Any other time, Pete would have been flattered that Patel held her in such regard, but now she was merely beginning to sweat. If anyone saw her, Patel would toss her in lockup. He was an intractable bastard and Ollie had already had to convince him not to arrest her simply for finding the writing.

McCorkle didn’t have much in the way of possessions—no box of keepsakes, no photos, not even an awkwardly hidden stash of porno.

The drawer refused to close when she shoved it back, and Pete rattled it, keeping one eye out for the constable. A gurney had arrived to take McCorkle on to the Lambeth mortuary, and she heard Patel snap an order before his footsteps started down the hall to the bedroom.

“Shit,” Pete hissed, jamming her hand into the thin space between wood and wall. That was one benefit of being petite—she could reach the tight spots. Pickpockets and coppers, Connor had said. The two trades that rewarded quick hands and devious minds.

Her fingers brushed a bundle attached to the underside of the wardrobe with DIY tape, and Pete snatched it. It was a plastic Tesco bag, wrapped round and round something that smelled like a cross between a dodgy restaurant and rotting orchids. When she touched the plastic, the Black flared again, a veritable flash flood of power cascading over and around her mind, clawing with small fractious fingers to be let inside.

Pete shoved the mess into her jacket, kicked the drawer shut, and leaped across the room to a sitting position on the bed, just as Patel burst in.

“I hope you have something damn impressive to say about all this, Miss Caldecott, because otherwise I’m going to arrest you right now.”

Pete looked up at him. Patel’s cheeks had flushed to a deep magenta, and his regal nose flared with every breath. She considered for a moment, keeping her arm clamped to her side to hold the bundle against her stomach. “Nothing comes to mind.”

“You think I’m fucking about? I’ll have you,” Patel snarled. “You were a liability on the force, and now you’ve apparently fucked off ’round the bend with the fortune-tellers. I don’t care who your dad was—I’ll have you. Conspiracy to murder. Start talking.”

“Felix, bloody Hell, it’s my fault,” Ollie said. He was also red, hands trembling and sweat breaking out on his temples. Some might mistake it for anger in a man of his size, but Pete knew Ollie, and Ollie was scared.

“Don’t cover for her, Heath,” Patel said. “You’re just going to make it worse than it already is.” He sneered at Pete. “Outside consultant, my arse. Whose cock did you suck to stay out of jail thus far?”

“Your mum’s. Disappointingly small.” Pete stood. “I’m leaving. You can charge me if you have the balls.”

She left the crime scene, feeling curiously numb after the flashover of rage. The thing in her pocket prickled her skin and she drew her hand away. She’d be furious at Ollie for dragging her into this if he weren’t as fucked as she. He’d probably lose his job and his pension, if Newell was in a foul enough mood. Not to mention that in under an hour she’d managed to both get McCorkle killed and make an enemy of Felix Patel, the sort of hard-nosed bastard who’d probably harass her with traffic citations and littering charges until the end of time, just because he could.

“Arse,” Pete said, though Patel was long out of earshot. She hated being out of her element, hated that she was a tourist in the world of the Black with no talent of her own besides being filled to the brim and possibly burned alive any time she came in contact with sorcery. Hated that she couldn’t find her feet, solve the problem. All she could do was walk to the fucking bus stop, sit and wait to be taken back across the river, a lost soul riding the steam and neon of London back to the underworld.

So what are you going to do about it, then? That was Jack, all smirk and permanent halo of smoke. Not like you to just fuck off and moan about your sorry lot, luv.

Pete hunched into her jacket inside the bus shelter. This late, it’d be nearly an hour before she could catch a night bus.

She didn’t have Jack’s talent, nor his twenty-five years of living, breathing, and dreaming the Black, but she had his books and she had Lawrence. She could moan forever, knocking about the Black like the sad old bastard who wants to sit beside you in pubs and talk about the war, or she could admit she’d cocked up, climb back on top of the problem, and start over. She could still find the why and who of Gerard Carver’s last ritual. Fuck it, if she found that, she’d likely find who killed McCorkle.

It all seemed like a brilliant plan, until the thing in Pete’s pocket began to whisper, rushing tides of the Black cascading over her mind, as if she were hearing snatches of esoteric radio out the windows of the few passing cars.

Pete cast her eyes into the small patch of unlit park across the street. A darker piece of nighttime stood among the bare oaks. It was the same thin figure that had tried to accost her at the mortuary. Eyes gleamed in the dark, picking up the streetlamps.

The figure smirked at her across Coldharbour Lane, standing perfectly still for a moment before he took a step toward her, then another. Pete looked up and down the street. This late, she could hear the thump of bass from a club a few blocks down, but there was nobody else on the pavement. The bus shelter didn’t offer any protection and the alleyway beyond even less.

The figure picked up speed, long, loping strides closing the distance between them with frightening alacrity. Pete felt the thing in her pocket prickle, coming alive at the onslaught of the figure.

Necromancers could call a lot of things—poltergeists, zombies, and worse. Pete decided she wasn’t going to wait until the thing made it across the street to find out exactly what it was, although the loping, bowlegged stride and the long, narrow sliver of face she could see under the streetlamps bore out her theory that it wasn’t a human thing.

Pete ran straight toward it, dodging at the last moment and causing the thing to stumble and wheel about. It hissed, and she heard the scrape of claws on asphalt as it chased her. The Black was rising, filling the empty spaces around her as Pete bore for the park, the musty stench of something long dead breathing in her face.

The park across the street bore stern warnings that it was closed from dusk till dawn, but she grabbed the rusty iron gate and heaved herself over. Metal bit into her hand, but she kept running.

The thing vaulted the gate on spindly legs, closing fast, and Pete bore down. She’d been smoking too much and running too little, and her lungs scissored with every breath, but she ran. Magic dogged her every step, the moon slicing light and shadow out of the ground. The green space ended in someone’s garden wall, and she scrambled up, feeling wetness on her palm as it scraped across brick. The thing chasing her landed on top of the wall, crouched like a spider for a moment as it roved to catch her in its gaze, and then gave a hiss like an enormous kettle as it sprang back to the ground and kept chasing.

Pete burst from between the narrow buildings onto Atlantic Road, feet nearly going on the uneven pavement. The vista there was even more deserted, National Rail tracks bordering the street on one side and dark windows on the other. Fingers, or perhaps claws, snatched at the back of her jacket; she didn’t look back to find out. A newsagent a few doors down was still lit, and she poured her last ounce of oxygen on.

She made it halfway across Atlantic Road, and then thing caught her, wrapping too-long fingers around her thigh and pulling her off balance. Pete fell and rolled once, the thing on top of her, its hand going around her neck.

It hissed at her, and Pete had the feeling it was talking to her, or perhaps cursing, in its own language. The hair on its head was matted, stitched into place with red thread, and Pete saw why it couldn’t speak—its blue, swollen lips were stitched as well.

Zombie. Of course. Just her bloody luck. Zombies were like poltergeists, except where poltergeists were dead things, stripped down to anger and cruelty and honed like a blade, zombies were the same thing, summoned into corpses prepared for the purpose. The mouth was stuffed with ritual herbs, and the eyes were crossed out with black thread. Zombies weren’t bright, but they were relentless and resilient. Pete pounded ineffectually at the thing’s chest, skin cool and pulpy under her fists, like a rotted orange.

The zombie scrabbled at her clothes, overgrown nails tearing holes in her shirt and raking at the skin beneath. Pete kicked and struggled as much as she could. Screaming was out of the question, with the thing’s hand around her throat. Zombies were strong, fueled by the rage of the ghost bound inside their flesh, and she wouldn’t have been a match even if she hadn’t just run a fucking forty-yard dash.

It stared down at her with its eyes crossed by thick black stitches, hissing and scratching as if it were an enormous, furious housecat and Pete was the mouse.

She didn’t really mean to use the last of her air on a spell. She wasn’t even very good at magic, at least that sort, when she was focused and calm and not being set upon by a corpse with a bad attitude. Still, the word came to mind and flew from mind to tongue with minimal intervention. It was the simplest of hexes, one Jack could throw out pissed and standing on one leg, but Pete had never been able to simply grab a handful of power and fling it outward in the same way. She gasped rather than spoke with any authority, her vision starting to spin as her last breath went. “Sciotha!”

The Black rippled around them, as if she’d cast a stone into it, and Pete felt a small tug on her chest. The zombie lurched, as if he’d caught a limb in a bear trap, and then fell to the side, twitching like a squashed insect.

Pete gasped for a moment. The newsagent, who’d been closing his shutters, was on the pavement a few yards away, staring. Pete met his eyes, and the man held up his hands and retreated. In Brixton, they clearly knew not to get involved in street fights involving a petite woman and a hulking hellbeast.

Her throat burned, and her shoulder and knees throbbed when she got up and started going through the zombie’s pockets. It was wearing a polyester suit, cheap and unidentifable. It didn’t have any marks of being embalmed, and it wasn’t decayed overmuch. Pete would lay money the body’s former owner had been murdered specifically to bind the ghost inside him. She went through the suit’s pockets with fast fingers. The paralyzer hex didn’t last forever, even when it was thrown by someone who knew what they were doing. The zombie’s legs began to thrash, and he bucked under her like an excitable pony.

“Why you following me, eh?” Pete said, holding him by the neck as he’d pinned her. “What’re you after, you scuttling piece of shit?”

The zombie’s cloudy eyes rolled back in its head and it made an enraged sound, low and guttural. Pete found nothing in the pockets except a dry-cleaner’s receipt and a few pennies. The zombie made a feeble swipe at her as she tossed the items aside, and she caught sight of a faded mark, not from ritual but from ink. An ace of spades nearly hidden in the webbing of the man’s thumb, the sort of thing they stamped on your hand at clubs that washed off in a few hours.

“I don’t know if you understand any of this,” Pete said, standing as the zombie began to twitch more violently. “But if your masters send you after me again, I’m going to chop you into firewood and douse you in petrol. Right?”

The zombie hissed.

“Right,” Pete said, and took off running before somebody called the police.

CHAPTER 16

She rang Lawrence from an all-night café in Southwark, after she’d walked and doubled back enough times to satisfy her throbbing heart and twitchy nerves that no one and nothing was follwing her.

Lawrence mumbled, “I know you’re nocturnal, but some of us ain’t.”

“Fucking zombies,” Pete said. “Fucking zombies after me, Lawrence. Within full view of a bunch of Met officers. These bastards have got balls the size of the O2.”

He yawned. “Who’s got zombies?”

“Whoever killed the bloke we asked the Antiquarians about,” Pete said. “I’m bloody angry now, Lawrence.” Bad enough to top McCorkle, bad enough to try for her at the mortuary—a host of sorcerers against her was something that never would have happened six months ago. Morningstar had been right, much as she was loath to admit it—the 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 latter, she hoped he’d let up soon. The pain was causing her to make odd, gasping noises that sounded as if she were drowning. Sooner or later, the curse would kill her nerve endings, and then her ability to breathe, and finally her brain cells, magic dissecting her into so much blood and bone.

The curse-thrower twitched up his soft gray wool trousers and crouched, cocking his head to look in her face. “Hello, Pete,” he said, and smiled. He had the sort of smile that could stop traffic. If you didn’t know that in his private moments he was a murderer, a sorcerer, and a sadist.

Pete tried to say Nicholas fucking Naughton, but managed a feeble sort of squeak. Naughton chucked her under the chin. “Don’t get up. I know you’re not being rude.”

Nicholas Naughton was a necromancer. That made a bit of sense. She’d been looking for a necromancer, hadn’t she? The kind of nasty cunt who’d carve a man up and leave him for the world to see. Nicholas Naughton was precisely that kind of cunt. He’d nearly gotten Jack killed when he’d sent Pete and Jack to put down a poltergeist he’d lost control over. His own brother’s ghost, which he’d tortured to the point of madness.

“I do love this flat,” Naughton said, straightening up. “It’s a piece of shit, but it’s got excellent bones. I’d shovel out the esoteric crap. Paint it white. Something tasteful yet respectful of the lines.” He passed his hands over the things on the coffee tables—Pete’s laptop, the ashtray, an empty teacup, a snowglobe she’d bought Jack when they drove to Brighton. “Wondering how I got in?” he cocked his eyebrow at Pete. “Wondering how I got here in the first place?”

He sat on her sofa, arms out, ankle over knee like he sat there every day. “Imagine my surprise when my zombie shambles home and informs me he met a feisty little mage in Coldharbour Lane. A feisty little female mage using Fiach Dubh magic that I was under the impression had died with the last soppy little wanker who tried to throw his weight around and found himself wanting.”

Fuck you, Pete tried for, but she couldn’t even croak this time. She was at the edge of unconsciousness, and she heard her blood rushing past her ears like a flight of birds, light and feathery as her heartbeat faded.

“But then I remembered.” Naughton leaned forward and helped himself to a fag from the pack on the table. “That soppy wanker had himself a sweet little lady friend, who’s exactly the sort of persistently nosy bitch who’d be hanging around a dead policeman’s flat. And I found you in no time at all.” He sat back, lit, and drew a cherry on the end of his fag, and all at once Pete felt the curse lift. “You’re looking very well,” Naughton said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Pete stayed still. It wouldn’t do to move too soon. Taking a body-bind curse was like taking a cricket bat to the kidneys—blunt and stunning, until the magic had ebbed. She focused on breathing first, in and out, the sweet, stale air of the flat and Naughton’s cigarette. Moving would come in good time. Naughton wasn’t going to off her straightaway. He’d had his chance when she’d walked in like she was strolling down fucking Oxford Street. He might still torture and kill her, but right now he was going for maximum theatricality. He wanted to frighten her into something, so she had a little time.

“World’s dangerous these days,” Naughton told her. “Can’t trust a bloody soul. Looks like your friend McCorkle discovered that rather more abruptly than most.” He held out his hand, beckoned with his palm. “I’ll have what you took from his flat.”

“Fuck you,” Pete said. It came out quite loud that time.

Naughton set his fag down with precision on the edge of the ashtray, and then walked up to Pete and kicked her hard, once, in the stomach. “Don’t think you fool me,” he said, patting her down efficiently and finding the bag. “You’re so scared your poor little breast is heaving.” He sat back on his heels, unrolled the crumpled plastic, and dropped the object wrapped in red thread into his palm.

Feathers and a bundle of black herb protruded, and Pete felt a thin spike find purchase behind her eyes, just a flit of power, a solar flare that died quickly as it rose.

“Not much juice left in it,” Naughton said. “Still, would be awkward if the police put it in one of those neat little baggies and eventually, by dint of the thin gleam of light making it up to their head through the crack of their arse, discovered what this little beauty is for.” He retreated, picked up his fag again.

Pete tried putting a little weight on her arms and found she could sit up, though everything swam into trim more slowly than she had. No heroic kung fu moves, then. “You knew McCorkle?”

“Only as a thief and a brigand,” said Naughton, tossing the little bundle in his hand.

“Jesus Christ, who says brigand anymore?” Pete said. She drew her legs under her, pulled herself to sit on the low table, and got her own fag. Kept everything slow and easy, not because she didn’t want Naughton getting the wrong idea but because she still felt as if she might pitch face-first into the carpet if she went too quickly.

“Freddy McCorkle bought something from Gerard Carver, something that belonged to me,” Naughton said. “He was as dirty as a fucking ha’penny whore’s twat, a bent copper, whatever you want to say. You think it’s fate he attached himself to Ollie Heath like a barnacle? With Heath comes you, dear Petunia, and occult artifacts would have bought Mr. McCorkle a lovely terrace in Highgate to live out his days.”

“You kill him?” Pete dragged. Breathed. Watched Naughton’s every twitch.

“I planted the seed,” Naughton said. He tapped the bundle once against Pete’s nose. “It’s just a bit of hoodoo magic, whispers in your ear, makes you think perhaps this life is a bit too much to take.” He shoved the thing into his pocket. “Peasant shit, but I thought I was rather clever. And before you ask, I had no direct hand in the untimely death of Gerard fucking Carver.”

“Wasn’t going to ask that,” Pete said. “Just wondering if you were going to be leaving any time soon, or should I call for some takeaway?”

“Did the police find something in McCorkle’s flat?” Naughton asked.

“They found a lot of somethings,” Pete said. “Mainly blood, from where poor Freddy decided to carve himself a new smile with a bread knife.” She stubbed her fag out, put weight on the balls of her feet. She could be up and moving if she had to, and that would have to be good enough. “You wouldn’t be thinking of a Babylonian funerary tablet, would you? The kind Carver was nicking from the museum?”

Naughton clapped his hands together. “Oh, very good. Always the detective, even when she’s not. No, my dear. That was not precisely what I meant. But I do thank you for not stalling and trying for doelike innocence. I’d hate to have to take a hand to that sweet little face.”

“I’d hate to see you after you tried,” Pete said. “Anything else?”

“We’re finished, I think,” Naughton said. “Obligatory advice: Stop poking at my business. Gerard got exactly what was coming to him. Next time, it won’t be one lousy zombie.”

“I’m not scared of you,” Pete told him. She waved the pack of Parliaments at him. “You owe me fags. And a new protection hex.”

“Get somebody who halfway knows what they’re doing in next time,” Naughton said. “That one was a bit embarrassing.”

“Leave,” Pete told him. “You can come in any time you want, I’m not safe in my own home. Point fucking made. Kindly let me be.”

Naughton picked up his leather coat and slid into it like a snake retaking its skin, broad shoulders flexing under oily black. “Just this, Petunia: You’re quick and brave and all the things a Weir should be, but when it comes right down to it, you’re a receptacle for mages. Not even a magical pussy, or any sort of that feminist claptrap. A rubber lying in the gutter. You catch the leavings of magic. And your mage is dead, and the Black isn’t the place of heroes and cowboys any longer.” He opened her door and fished a pair of sunglasses from his coat. “Don’t push me. I’ll fucking gut you.”

Pete didn’t move for ten minutes after the door shut, and when she did, all of her blood equalized with a feeling like plunging off the first drop in a roller coaster. Her muscles felt weak, kittenish, and she stumbled to the front door, throwing the deadbolt, the second lock, and the hasp at the top of the jamb, which she didn’t think Jack had bothered to lock, ever.

She watched her fingers shake for a moment, clasping the old iron. The curse was gone but the cold was still with her. Nick Naughton had come into her home, into her fucking flat, and he’d paralyzed her without so much as a word. He could have done anything—raped her, killed her, made her rise again as one of his spirits like his brother, Danny.

He hadn’t, but he’d known she’d think of it later, and know he could have. And that would be worse.

Pete checked the locks on all the windows, especially the kitchen window that looked out onto the fire stairs, and then she got the bottle from the cupboard and poured herself three fingers of whiskey, which she gulped down with two fast, hard swallows.

Her hands still rattled the glass as she set it down, and pulled her knees up to her chest on the sofa. Her heart continued to thrum until she’d poured another inch of whiskey into herself. She was scared of Naughton—anyone in their right mind would be scared by an unstable necromancer breaking into their flat—but she wasn’t afraid of him. Petty thug-level threats meant she’d scared him, too.

At the very least, his line about Gerard Carver was a load of crap. If Naughton hadn’t held the knife, he knew who did. He’d set up McCorkle, and he knew what spell Carver had been meant to work. He knew it all.

Pete went and put her glass in the kitchen sink, working her fingers on the porcelain edge until she was sure all the feeling had returned. Lawrence and probably even Jack would tell her to leave it, let Naughton think he’d won, and back the fuck off before she found herself with a sliced throat or worse.

But he’d come into her home, threatened her. She doubted Morningstar would be dissuaded by the tale, either. And if Pete was honest with herself, Nick Naughton had royally trampled on her toes, and she’d relish the opportunity to do a bit of stomping in return.

She wrote down the number Lawrence had given her for Motor, and then went to bed, burrowing under the coverlet until the last of the cold disappeared.

CHAPTER 17

Her first stop that evening, after she’d dealt with her new crop of bruises and cuts and found clothes that covered the worst ones, was a council block in Peckham, some of the new construction, very neat and tidy, with a geranium sprouting in the front window of number thirteen. Pete knocked with the flat of her fist. “Denny!”

A curtain twitched, and a moment later the door was thrown open. “Fuck off!” Denny Pendergast told her. “I’m clean, and you ain’t even a cop any longer.”

Pete folded her arms. “At least half of that is bullshit, and anyway, I’m not here in my former professional capacity.”

“I should fucking hope not.” He sniffed. “Considering the only job you’d have nowadays that’d allow you to knock on my door would be mail girl or prozzie.”

“I’m a private citizen and that means I can put a steel-toed boot in your crotch with very little repercussion,” Pete told him. “Let me in, unless you want to conduct business in the breezeway, all smiling for the CCTVs. Somehow I don’t think you’ve been out of Pentonville long enough to show off.”

Denny grumbled and pulled the door wide. He knew she couldn’t do fuck-all about anything she saw inside, and he was grinning as her eyes roved over the stacks of newspapers, the broken-down sofa facing the high-end gaming system and LCD television, and the pair of plain black gun safes that comprised Denny’s sitting room.

“I need a pistol,” she told him. Denny’s skinny sharp-boned face split in a wary grin.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

Pete pointed at the cut on her face, which had gone from bloody gash to angry red line. She wasn’t sure which was worse. “Do I look like I’m pulling your bony leg, you tosser?”

Denny considered, and then went to the safe on the left and punched in a combination. “What sort you need?”

“Sig Sauer?”

He snorted. “In your fucking dreams. Copper wants a copper’s gun. There’s a shock.” He gestured at the safes. “I’ve revolvers from the stone age, Steyer knockoffs out of Russia, and if you’re considering an upgrade, couple of fucking pristine Winchester Model Sevens. For you, I give the civil-service discount. Cash up front, no refunds, no exchanges.”

“I just need something small I can shove in my jeans,” Pete sighed. “And that takes ammo enough to do some real damage with the first shot.”

Denny raised a finger. “My stock’s not classy enough for your kind of person, Former Detective Inspector Caldecott, but I did take something in trade last week. Wait here.”

He returned with a pistol wrapped in cloth. “It’s a fucking antique but it’ll get the job done.”

Pete hefted the little Walther and tucked it into the waistband of her denim, smoothing her jacket over it. She might as well have been concealing nothing at all. It wasn’t slick and nickle plated like James Bond’s, but she wasn’t about to get picky over aesthetics. “It shoots?”

“ ’Course it shoots.” Denny pulled an offended face. “I’d be out of business pretty fucking quick if I sold ornamental shooters.”

“Fine,” Pete said, taking the gun out and testing the weight and balance. It was a good little piece, and deceptively heavy. “How much?”

“On the house, provided you never, ever come back here again,” Denny said. “It’s a showy piece, high-end. I sell it to some fucking street hustler, he shoots some fucking boy over some drunken fight, the cops find the original owner and through that whiny little ponce find me. Doing me a favor.” He handed her a box of bullets. “Hollow point. You’ll tear a bloke up with those.”

“Cheers.” Pete secreted the box in her bag and the Walther back in her waistband. “Bye, Denny.”

“Oi,” Denny said, when she was on the stoop. “You never did tell me what you want an untraceable piece for, Caldecott. Always figured you were a regular straight arrow. Charged into battle with your baton and a prayer.”

“Me?” Pete smoothed her shirt over the gun. “No. Straight arrow is something I don’t have the luxury of being any longer.”

Denny started to say something, but he changed it midstream to, “Where you off to?”

Pete stepped into the breezeway and zipped her coat against the chill that came with sunset. “I’m off to see a man about a corpse.”

CHAPTER 18

Whatever else happened, Pete felt calmer having decided on one thing—if Nicholas Naughton came near her again, she was going to put two bullets between his eyes. The sick stomach and itch on the back of her neck she’d felt since Naughton had broken into her flat finally calmed a little.

She saw the owl sitting on a lightpost soon after she got off the tube in Southwark. It stared at her, unblinking. Pete flicked it off and approached a boy on the corner, shiny red and gold windcheater and iPod marking him as the kind of hustler she needed. “Oi.”

He looked up at her with bright, speed-contracted pupils. “Wot?”

“You know a club called Motor?”

The hustler blinked rapidly at her. “Sure I do, but it ain’t the kind of place you want.”

Pete had dressed the part, black army jacket, boots, black denim. No copper signals from her. The hustler’s reluctance was, as far as she was concerned, just being contrary. “Why not?”

“Ain’t for straight folks,” the hustler said. “Now, you want something to taste, I gots crystal, hash, pills, morphine…”

“Regular little underground Boots, aren’t you?” Pete said. She pulled out a tenner and folded it between her fingers. When the hustler grabbed for it, she snatched it back. “Motor. Where?”

“Your funeral, ain’t it?” the hustler sighed. He pointed to an abandoned building at the end of the block. “Down in the cellar. You won’t get in, though. Need a password, like one of them skeevy sex clubs.”

“Thanks for that,” Pete said. “Time Out should come ’round and interview you, really.”

The hustler dialed his iPod back up. Pete walked, and the shadow of the owl flicked over her face as it glided away beneath the streetlamps.

The Hecate could send all the omens she wanted. Pete wasn’t biting. She had far more pressing issues, like how she was going to talk her way into Motor. And trying to ignore the nerves, telling her it was a bad fucking idea in the first place, that she wouldn’t learn anything new, and might get the shit kicked out of her besides.

A cross faced her when she reached the door the hustler had pointed at, covered over with several layers of racist graffiti and concert posters advertising bands that had last come through London several years previous. OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL had been painted across the facade, but the letters been defaced to GOOD CO N.

The neon underneath the facade crunched beneath her boots, shattered, and the burn marks spelled out REPENT TO THE LORD, FOR ONLY IN HIM WILL YOU FIND SALVATION.

The basement level, at the bottom of a narrow set of brick steps, appeared to have staved off vandalism, in the form of a heavy fire door that looked as if it could withstand an IRA bomb. Pete pressed the buzzer. The Black was thick here, gathering in what had once been a sacred place, profane as a swastika across the face of the Virgin Mary. The energy wasn’t friendly, as much as the Black was ever friendly. Pete felt it tighten against her skull, trying to worm its way inside and fill up her reservoirs. She shut her eyes and breathed short and sharp through her nose. Pressed the buzzer again.

Thunder cracked somewhere close, and a smattering of rain fell on Pete before a slot in the door slid open, and an eye regarded her. “Yeah?”

“I’m…” Pete started, ready to flirt, threaten, or lie her way inside as the occasion called for. She knew enough names to chat a good game, at least until someone more intelligent than a door minder got involved.

“Pete Caldecott,” said the eye’s owner. “Hang on.”

Pete composed herself in the few seconds it took the fire door to unlock itself and roll open. She’d never thought her name would get her anything in the Black except grief.

The eye belonged to a bouncer, and the bouncer was, contrary to gravelly growl and shaved head, a woman, half a foot taller and probably twice as wide as Pete. “You’re not much, are you?” she asked Pete.

“You look like enough for both of us,” Pete said. The bouncer stepped aside and clapped her on the back hard enough to realign her vertebrae.

“Have fun, little girl.”

Motor started out in a long, oppressive hall that seemed to vanish into an event horizon, painted as it was in jet black with white, light-reactive graffiti over the entire length that faded as the dark encroached again with the slamming of the door.

Music flowed through the walls, up through the soles of her boots and into her bones. Hard, percussive, post-apocalyptic music that made you want to put a fist through someone’s face. She caught the tail end of “Ace of Spades” before it switched over to an old track by Slayer.

A beaded curtain parted before her, and a couple stumbled out, girl and boy attired almost identically in studs, denim, and blunt, face-breaking boots. Pete gave them a berth, as their clothes were already starting to come off.

She pushed the curtain, sticky with nicotine residue, aside, and stepped into the club proper. There had been plenty of shady dives in her days following Jack’s band around, but none made her feel quite so much as if she’d stepped into the Wild West.

The music emanated from an ancient, scarred Wurlitzer that dominated one wall, red lights rotating over the gathering of faces in a gibbous, arhythmic pattern, like living blood spatter. PA speakers grew from snaking cables and sprouted over the pit like cubist flowers.

Gleaming white paintings continued over all the walls, flaring and fading as light hit. Giant eyes, inverted pentagrams, all of it just a bit too sharp and real to be random graffiti. Motor might have been a club on the daylight side, but Naughton’s fleshcrafters had been busy decorating.

The club consisted of a bar, blocked in with razor wire except for a few small gaps through which a bartender roughly the size and shape of a lorry pushed pints, the pit, and a stage. The stage was empty, but the pit was full, flashing metal and flowing ink over skin, the crunch and thud of flesh and bone connecting, hard.

Pete joined the crowd around the bar, taking an inventory of the locals before she did anything foolish, like open her mouth. If Naughton had really been serious, somebody would find her and scold her soon enough. The song changed again, and the rhythm of the pit increased, bodies heaving like corpses on a tide.

Arms shoved her, and a bloke with a mohawk held stiff by orange spray-paint knocked into her, moving her away from the bar and toward the edge of the pit. Pete turned around and shouted “Oi!” but the mass had their backs to her, focused on shouting orders at the bartenders. “Fucking Hell,” Pete said. Her bruises reminded her to be more careful about being shoved while she studied the crowd. No faces popped out. What had she been expecting? A sinister backroom where all of Naughton’s secrets would be revealed? Dark rites conducted in the VIP lounge? The reality was a grungy, passé club full of metalheads and smells she could just as well do without.

Another body brushed against her, and Pete’s foot skidded over the edge of the pit. Just enough to put her off balance, and she felt herself going over. It wasn’t a far drop, less than a meter, but she fell badly and landed on the shoulder the zombie had already scored with. The crowd pressed in above her, as if she were lying at the foot of a row of gravestones, granite angels watching her with pale, sightless eyes in the flicking strobe light.

The music turned to indecipherable feedback through the antique PA as a boot landed in her gut, then another. Pete curled to protect herself, but there were feet and hands from all directions. The floor shook as one, then another, then a herd of the spectators dropped into the pit and crammed it even more. Another boot, a steel toe, connected with her shoulder blade and a cry escaped her lips, lost in the static and the screaming speakers.

Dancers paid her no mind, their movements changing from pogos and flying elbows to a concentrated orgy of blunt force that began at the foot of the stage and rippled out. She saw a woman grab the man next to her and pull his head down to connect with her knee. Two other men began bashing their skulls together, the sound of bloody meat going straight to her gut.

Around Pete, the air changed, as if the storm outside had wormed its way in. The insidious cold that she’d learned the hard way to associate with necromantic spells crept across her face. She fumbled for her pistol, attempting to protect her midsection and breasts with her free arm. She didn’t know what good, exactly, a handful of bullets would do her, but she wasn’t bloody well going to kick off on the sticky, ale-scented floorboards of a shitty metal club.

The violence rose as if a toxic tide were sweeping the pit, and Pete felt a warm spatter of raindrops across her face. Her tongue tasted of iron. A woman in leathers jumped on the back of a shirtless skinhead, gnawing at the Aryan tattoos arrayed across his shoulder blades. A pink-haired girl, even smaller than Pete, shrieked in time with the wordless whorl of sound as she beat her spiked bracelets against her own temples.

Feet and bodies impacted with her, buffeted her, lifted her up and slammed her back down. Pete felt a sharp, hot pain in her side and wagered a boot had cracked one of her ribs. Bodies pressed too close to allow her air, never mind space to crawl away. All around her in the pit the dancers screamed and flung themselves on one another.

A hand closed on the back of her jacket, and strong arms yanked her free of the throng, as it howled and spat and gouged at one another’s eyes. Pete railed against the arms for a moment, until she realized they weren’t groping or clawing, simply wrapped around her torso, holding her flush against a warm, hard chest heaving with its own breathlessness, encased in a black cotton shirt scented with whiskey, tobacco, and magic.

Pete twisted her head, in the low stuttering light of the club, and felt her body drop away from her heart. “Jack?”