Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “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 boyfrie
nd 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 hobb
led 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.