Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “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 i
n 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.”