Bone Gods

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 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