Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The patience Pete had held on a tenuous tether snapped, and she shouted. “What then, Jack? Give up? Ask Naughton nicely to please repent and change his ways? Or roll over and let him do what he likes? Because that’s not on my list of options.”

  She went to the front door of the flat, jabbing her arms into her jacket, wishing she could drive her fist into wall, slap Jack—something. “You stay here and mope if you like. I’m going to find someone who can actually help Ollie.”

  Jack jumped up from the sofa. “Pete, wait.”

  She ignored him, snatching up her keys and unlocking the deadbolt. Jack closed the space between them and slammed the door shut again, barring it with his arm. “I said wait, goddamn it! I’m not finished talking to you!”

  Pete rattled the door, which did precisely no good against Jack’s new bulk. “The time has well and truly fucking passed, Jack. I’m done talking.”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” he asked her. “The Black isn’t like the daylight world. Things don’t always work out like they should. Bad things happen to good blokes for absolutely no fucking reason at all, and it’s shit, but you pick up and you get on with things.”

  Pete stopped trying for the door, and slumped against it instead. Standing was still a dodgy proposition. “That’s my world, too, Jack. If you’d spent any time in it you’d realize that.” She spread her hands. “You said near death is the easiest way to find Carver. What are the others?”

  “Oh no,” Jack said. “That’s not an option, trust me.”

  “I’m not stupid enough to swallow a handful of pills and hope for the best,” Pete said. “So spill it, Winter, ’fore I beat it out of you.”

  Jack shoved his hand through his hair, but he let go of the door and conjured a fag, lighting it before he talked. “There’s a flower, a kind of orchid, that puts you under, down deep to near dead. Very Timothy Leary, lick the face of Jesus type of shit, but it will put you in the twilight long enough to dip into the thin spaces.”

  “Brilliant,” Pete said. “I’m in.”

  “Well, if it were that simple, every git with long flowing hair and a book on Wicca would be doing it, wouldn’t they?” Jack said. “Your soul leaves your physical form, Pete. You’re vulnerable to anything floating in the in-between, and if you don’t have the correct words to bring yourself back, well…” He made a poof motion with his hands. “You’re so much dust on the boot of the universe, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t come if you’re scared.” She tossed it off lightly, but she felt the ball of unrest grow in her stomach, the one that had led to nothing but trouble in the past. But what was her life these days except bad luck and trouble? Doing the ritual and downing some toxic flowers couldn’t make it any worse.

  “Right, I’m warning you off tripping to the brink of both physical and psychic death because I’m scared of the boogeyman.” Jack’s lip curled up, and the flash of smugness made him look a bit like his old self before it faded. “I’ve been dead before, Pete. It’s not one of the things that scares me at the moment.” He reached out and ran a thumb over her cheek, bringing his new cold with him. “ ’Sides, who’s going to help you out of trouble this time if I don’t ride along?”

  “Lawrence,” Pete said.

  “Lawrence?” Jack barked a laugh. “Luv, Lawrence would piss himself at the very thought of what you’re asking me. He’s a good little boy.”

  “He’s got more balls than you do right at the moment,” Pete said. “I’m doing it, Jack. You can come along or not.” With that, she did open the door.

  She heard Jack sigh “Fuck me all the days of my life,” and then he was walking beside her to the lift.

  CHAPTER 24

  They crossed into the Black and found the Lament, but Jack hesitated at the door. “I think you should do this bit alone.”

  “For the love of all that’s holy,” Pete said. “Have you got bloody stage fright?”

  Jack grimaced. “My little sojourn to the pit hasn’t exactly made me popular with people like these, in case you didn’t realize.” He pointed at the door. “Look, just go in and tell Mosswood I need to talk to him. He’ll understand.”

  “Maybe we should fit you for a giant nappy,” Pete said. “Perhaps warm you a bottle.”

  “Will you just fucking get this over with?” Jack demanded. He wasn’t smiling, not on his mouth and not in his eyes, which stared daggers of ice through Pete.

  She ducked her head. “Sorry. Not like anyone’s making you be a twat,” she muttered, pushing the pub door open. The Lament, never a rowdy place, fell dead silent as the punters caught sight of her. She saw Mosswood at his usual table, glass halfway to his lips. Taking a step forward felt like stepping into an electrical storm. The magic in the Lament was up, and it wasn’t friendly. Everything on Pete that could prickle stood on end. She kept her chin up and her shoulders square, passing quickly through the tables to Mosswood. A storm of whispers and muttering grew up around her, a rising tide of hostility that held an almost physical weight. If she’d still been a copper, she would’ve called for backup, but her backup was skulking outside, smoking and too much of a twist to come in himself.

  “Hello, Ian,” she said. She started to sit down but Mosswood shot up, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her within kissing distance.

  “Are you completely insane?” he hissed.

  “Not that I know of,” Pete said. “But I suppose if I have gone insane, I’d think everything was normal, wouldn’t I?”

  Mosswood didn’t smile. “I know, Petunia. Where is he?”

  “Outside,” Pete said. “For some reason he got the notion he wouldn’t be welcomed with open fucking arms.”

  “Idiot,” Mosswood snarled, not clarifying whether he was referring to her or Jack. He made for the door, still holding her. Pete was forced to follow him or have her arm dislocated.

  “Oi!” Pete shouted, digging her heels in. “You’re hurting me, Ian.”

  Mosswood stopped walking and let go of her, causing Pete to slam into him. “You stupid bint!” he shouted. “How dare you come in here as if everything were up in roses!” Lower he muttered, “Keep walking if you want to get out of here alive. You have no idea what that fool Winter has let you in for.”

  Pete gaped, but she forced herself to keep going, throwing a few more token curses for show as Mosswood hustled her outside and then distanced himself, fixing his cuffs and collar and shaking himself like a cat with its fur going the wrong way.

  “I’ve seen some displays of rampant stupidity in my time,” he told Pete. “But that one nears the top of my list.”

  “I’m still not seeing why walking into my local was so offensive,” Pete told him.

  “You walked in knowing full well you were with him.” Mosswood jerked his chin at Jack. “And that, my dear, is not a tenable place to be at the moment.”

  “Ignoring my popularity contest,” Jack said. “I need to speak with you, Ian.”

  “I should hope so.” Mosswood sniffed. “Though it did take you long enough. Jack Winter, the man not content to cheat death once, but a matched pair of miracles. Can’t even be bothered to drop in on his old mates. I see how it is.”

  “Need your help,” Jack said. Mosswood rolled his eyes heavenward.

  “Of course you do. Why else would you turn up, unless you wanted something, Jack?” He pressed his palms together and pointed them at Pete. “I implore you, whatever he’s tangled you in this time, back away. You’ve enough trouble on your own head as it is, getting into that spat with Nicholas Naughton.”

  “Nicholas Naughton can fuck himself with his gran’s tea service for all I care,” Pete snapped. “I need your help, Ian. We need your help. I know you’ve seen what’s happening in the Black, and if you think a bunch of necromancers coming out in the lead will help things, well. Maybe you’ve been sitting in that pub for too many centuries.”

  Mosswood drew himself up, his presence all at once outgrowing his sad tweed jacket and ragged
y trousers, dark eyes flaring with power. “I will not be cajoled to throw down my gauntlet on any side. I don’t concern myself with a rumpus between a few humans slinging magic they don’t understand.”

  Jack let out a laugh, short and gravelly as a smoker’s cough. “You and I both know that’s utter shit, Ian. Before you went soft and poncey and started dressing like Harry Potter’s creepy uncle, they used to sing songs about your … involvement … in mortal affairs.”

  “Even if I were inclined to help you, Jack,” Mosswood said, “I can’t. This isn’t my fight. When the dust clears, and the smoke’s gone, and the blood has soaked back into the earth, I expect I’ll continue on much as I have.” He made a motion to go back to the pub. “You, on the other hand … you’ve never been one of the survivors, Jack.”

  Jack muttered a string of curses and then kicked the side of the Lament, hard. “Forget it,” he told Pete. “He’s just another Fae fuck cowering behind his mystique. See how he likes a world made of cinders, with all his bloody trees—and followers, for that matter—a pile of ashes.”

  “Lovely imagery,” said Mosswood. “If you’re quite through with your speech, I was in the middle of a pleasant evening.”

  “You really think you can just sit in your pub while this storm passes you by?” Pete asked Mosswood. Her voice bounced off the alley, rolled back and forth through the ripples of the Black. “You think that you’re going to walk back out of that bloody pub after Naughton finishes what he started and the world will be exactly the same?” She took Mosswood by the shoulder and turned him to face her. “It won’t be. I’ve seen it in the daylight world, you know. Not magic, but drugs and guns and gangs. Naughton’s the tip of the iceberg. Under the water, there are other things. Dark days are coming, Ian, and you won’t be immune. Not you or any of your kind. Not Jack and certainly not fucking me. I’m not the type to lie down and die. With or without your help, I’m still going to try and stop this from happening.”

  Mosswood gave her a withering glance. “Take your hands off me, Miss Caldecott.”

  “I think you’re afraid that what I’m saying is absolutely true,” Pete told him, “and that when the blood and the dust settles, you’ll be just as dead as the rest of us.”

  Mosswood stared at her for a long time. His eyes were dark and green, the color of a deep forest where no light could penetrate and ancient things without eyes slithered beneath the roots of trees. “By staying with Winter, you’ve signed your own death note,” he said at last. “He’s not the man you think he is, Petunia. He never has been.”

  “You’ll either help us or you won’t,” Pete said. “You can bang on all day, but I don’t have to listen.”

  Mosswood dropped his chin to his chest. “Dare I ask what it is you even want from me?”

  “Nightsong orchid,” Jack said. “I’d get it from my usual supplier, but my lines have dried up. Me being dead and all.”

  Mosswood pointed at Pete. “You know what nightsong orchid is used for, I take it?”

  “She does,” Jack said. “This whole fucking circus is her idea. And that’s the other half. You bringing me back when I’ve gotten what I went under for.”

  “Oh, is that all,” Mosswood said. “I’m going back inside.”

  “Please, Ian!” Pete said. She didn’t dare grab him again, but she went after him to the pub door. “It is my idea,” she said. “It’s the only one I’ve got. I’d make excuses as to why, but know you don’t care, so will you help us or not?”

  The green man took his hands off the door. “I suppose I’ll never be able to live with myself if I don’t at least see how badly this turns out.” He gestured to the alley, pulling his sport coat around him. “Lead the way, Miss Caldecott, to our damnation.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The shop Mosswood led them to was the only lit window in a deserted close, golden lamplight spilling in a slow burn on the dark cobbles outside. The buildings around it were ramshackle, window glass destroyed, in one case merely a pile of rubble. Far off, Pete thought she caught the wail of a siren before it faded into nothing.

  Time and memory were fluid in the Black, and she thought she’d never really get used to walking from a nineteenth-century pub to Blitz-era London in the space of a few blocks.

  Mosswood knocked, and they waited. Several heartbeats went by, Pete’s breath misting the chill air. Now that she had a moment, in the stillness, with Jack standing silent beside her, all of the doubts she’d shrugged off in the heat of Jack reappearing came crawling back, like rats and roaches after the lights went out.

  She didn’t stand a hope against Naughton. He was a necromancer and a psychopath to boot. She didn’t stand a hope of hiding from the Hecate, even if she was never going to carry out their bloody orders. And even if she somehow got one over on Naughton and managed to evade the owl-eyed woman, Ethan Morningstar would be waiting for her with open arms and a pair of pliers.

  But there was still Ollie. Still Jack. And because of them, she had to at least try. If she went down kicking, it at least wouldn’t be a bad death. Better than her father’s, pale and wretched in a hospital oncology ward. Better than Jack’s, being led into the fold of a demon while it whispered in his willing ear.

  She straightened her spine as the door opened, though she realized she needn’t have bothered, because the woman before them was so stooped Pete had a good six inches on her. Pete wasn’t tall by anyone’s standards, including her own, so the crone was verging into comical territory.

  “What?” she demanded crossly. “Can’t you read?”

  Pete noticed there was a small notecard jammed crookedly in one of the door’s panes: HRS 11–7 DAILY. SHUT HOLIDAYS.

  “Now, Irina,” Mosswood said. “Is that any way to talk to your dear friend?”

  “Friend?” The woman peered up at him, lip curling back to reveal an impressively white and sharp set of dentures jammed into her wrinkled red lips. “You’re no friend of mine, Green Knight, any more than the Inland Revenue or the bloody clap.”

  Jack let out a snort over Pete’s shoulder. “I think I like this one, Ian. Ex-girlfriend?”

  Ian shot Jack the sort of glare Pete had seen often as a teenager, when she’d tried to sneak in late and Connor had caught her dressed in short skirts and smelling of lager and smoke.

  “You,” Irina said, catching sight of Jack. “You’re no better, are you? Just the crow hag’s rent boy, bringing bad black trouble like rot wherever you go.”

  “To be fair,” Jack said. “ ’M more like a high-priced escort. Talent like mine’s too good for streetcorners.”

  “Go away,” said Irina. “The lot of you.”

  Pete, seeing she was about to slam the door, said the phrase beloved of pushers the world over. “We can pay you.”

  Irina hesitated, peering up at her. Her face was framed by a red scarf, as if she were merely an overgrown doll. Her eyes, surrounded by crow’s feet, were nearly clouded over. Irina was blind as a bat, but she moved with the alacrity of a school-aged athlete and snatched Pete’s wrist.

  “Ohhh,” she cooed. “So we’ve brought a proper good and true vestal virgin with us to sweeten the pot, have we?”

  “I’m not very good,” Pete said. “And I’m hardly a virgin. Sorry to disappoint.”

  Irina carried on stroking as if Pete hadn’t spoken. “Her,” she said. “You two wait out here.”

  “Like Hell we will,” Jack said.

  Pete put a hand on Jack’s chest, feeling angry breath under the scarred leather. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s not like this is my first time on a buy.”

  Jack’s jaw ticked, but he only favored Irina with a glare. “Anything happens, you won’t have a corner black and secret enough to hide from me.”

  Irina muttered something that sounded as if it were Russian and defintely derogatory before dragging Pete inside. “Your man seems to think he’s in charge.” She chuckled.

  “He often does,” Pete said, and yanked her hand free of Ir
ina’s grasp. “No offense,” she said, when the old woman’s face crinkled. “You’re a bit clammy.”

  Irina began pulling sacks and boxes from one of the overflowing shelves on the shop wall. “What you need? Love potion? Fae nectar? We got some hydroponic hash my son Mikel grows. Mellow and sweet. Keeps you dreaming even when you’re awake.”

  “If I wanted pot,” Pete said, “don’t you think I’d find an easier way to get it?”

  Irina stopped throwing her merchandise around. “Let’s see your money, then.”

  “Let’s see if you have what I’m after,” Pete countered. The first rule of illicit transactions was not to appear eager. Don’t flash your cash. Don’t look vulnerable, or strung out, or more trouble than you’re worth. Above all, don’t act like a cop.

  “All right, all right,” Irina said, flapping her skirt and settling into an armchair at least as old as she was, and twice as decrepit. Her accent went from being raspy East End to a carefully educated diction, her syllables a bit too round to be native to British soil. “Obviously, you’re not here to waste my time. I’ll bring the usual dance to a halt, and you tell me what’s so important you bring the Green Man and that to my door.”

  “Fair enough,” Pete said. “I’m after nightsong orchid.”

  Irina sat forward, painted eyebrows wiggling. “That’s hardly a gateway drug.”

  “I’m not a gateways kind of girl,” Pete told her. “Can you get it or are you wasting my time?”

  “Of course I can.” Irina sniffed. “But I’d dearly love to know why you want it.”