Bone Gods bl-3 Read online

  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 ba
d 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.”