Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

“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?”

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.