Read Online Bone Gods by Caitlin Kittredge - Free Book Online

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