At the front of the room, a tall, slim woman in a narrow black dress and black high heels stood in front of the altar. Her blond hair was streaked with silvery gray, and the lines at the corners of her eyes said she had already seen fifty, but everything else said otherwise. She had picked up an ornate cup from the altar and held it in front of her while murmuring words that twined into the strange sound that occupied the room like another living being. A man, dressed just like the one at the edge of the circle, walked from the shadows and poured red liquid from a matching pitcher into the cup. The gold-colored lining of the cup turned black, and a dark vapor boiled over the rim, swirling into the air in an expanding spiral that wound toward the edges of the room.
As the dark mist touched the carved bones on the walls, they began to sing and wail, the smoke twisting through holes carved in the hollow shafts of arm and leg bones, around the curves of ribs, and through the gaping eye sockets of human skulls.
The woman said something that was drowned in the rising wail of the bone flutes. The greater volume of blood that ran from Soraia’s arm lifted from the floor and flowed swiftly now toward the floating man at the middle of the circle, following the path of light like water in a pipe. As it touched his outstretched right hand, the blood turned to mist that spread over his arm and side, vanishing in the black cloth. The spell moved through him as if he were some kind of conductor. Bones from the pile on his left rose into the air in the moving light, assembling themselves into a skeleton that gained the momentary shape of its former owner.
Sharp memories of death enveloped me in pain as the ghost seemed to fight and resist, spinning in the light, and was then crushed with a screech back into a bundle of white that tumbled across the room to fall into one of the polished wooden boxes on the right side of the circle. The man with the candle walked to the box, closed the lid over the clattering bones, and fastened the latch. Then he murmured over it as he dripped the black wax over the latch until the metal was covered. He pressed a small object against the wax and the remains fell silent.
The song of the bones faded to what it had been before. I caught my breath at the same moment that the woman at the altar seemed to draw hers for the first time in minutes. Her shoulders slumped a little as if they’d been doing this all night. “Now the girl,” she said.
The man with the candle began to walk counterclockwise around the circle as if he were going to change sides. Quinton lunged forward, shedding his cloak of darkness, and wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders and head, then twisted, using his momentum to add power to the motion.
I didn’t hear the man’s neck break, but the shock of his death knocked me to the ground with a gasp and I fell across the edge of the illuminated circle. The woman screamed in rage. Quinton buckled to the floor with me, caught in the lashing pain by our paranormal connection.
The light from the circle’s edge seemed to burn through me for a moment before it flashed and vanished with a stink of burning hair. I struggled to regain my feet, just inside the circle this time, aching and breathing as raggedly as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I turned to lurch toward Soraia from my knees; however, as the one to break the circle, I was subject to the effect of the bone magic now that I was outside the cloak of Carlos’s protection. The presence of the ghastly bones with all their death hummed in the lingering cloud of power that the mage had raised. The strange magic seemed to stab at my own skeleton with hooked blades, slowing me and pulling me downward.
Carlos had darted across the broken circle, revealed from the shadows, and was reaching for the floating man who was moving as though dazed in his bubble of light. The woman shouted some words and upended the cup on the altar, red liquid flowing in bloody rivulets over the white bones. She snatched the hand of her assistant and drove a knife through it, pinning him to the base of the cup as he screamed in shock. Blood ran down the cup and into the intricate carvings on the altar bones, burning them red.
The floating man plunged to the floor in a clatter of bones and an icy pall of mist enclosed him, seeming to bear him to the floor and hold him there. Carlos smashed his fist against the opaque white shape the steam and bones had taken. His hand rebounded as if the dome had hardened. He roared in anger and turned toward the woman as Quinton ran several steps ahead of me, heading for the cage that held his niece.
The woman spoke rapidly and made a flinging motion in Quinton’s direction. A whirling ivory chain of bone caught him around the legs and upper body, flipping him to the floor with a crash that shook dust from the columns of skulls nearby. He tried to ignore the spell and squirmed toward Soraia’s cage, but he could move only a few inches. He gasped, his face going pale, and he fought to move forward, the labor of his breathing mixing with his niece’s weak sobs and the panting of the man whose hand was transfixed by a dagger.
The woman made another gesture, as if lofting something into the air, and four of the bony figures from the walls began to detach and walk toward us. The first reached me in a moment and snatched for my head with its skeletal hands. I ducked, wincing, and swiped at it, yanking a bone loose from its lower leg and rolling aside. The bone melded to the floor as the walking skeleton fell over me. Its bones rattled against the mosaic of smaller bones, sticking and forming a partial cage around me. Kicking and yanking, I thrashed, breaking the bones as I tried to get back to my feet. The next skeleton didn’t even try to grab me, but threw itself on top of the other, its bones sliding straight down like spears.
I yanked the edge of the Grey and tugged it over me like a shield, isolating myself in the folds as the bones pierced through, shoved aside by the Grey where they hadn’t yet encountered another bone. Then they sealed themselves to the floor or to other bones when they touched at last. The cage was tight and without the edge of the Grey over me, the plunging bones would have gone right through me. I had no desire to see what would happen if they had pushed through my flesh to my own bones. But the bones were brittle with age and I continued to kick and beat at them, making my way out.
The third skeleton crushed itself over Quinton as he crept toward Soraia’s prison, but Quinton rolled, knocking more of the bones aside than I had been able to. The scattered bones hit the floor and made a small obstacle. Quinton was still barely moving, squirming forward by inches, borne down by the spell that enclosed him. I fought to get back to my feet, but it felt like the floor was drawing my own bones down to it and rising was more difficult than it should have been.
The woman took a step away from the altar, satisfied that Quinton and I were no threat now. She picked up a small white object and left her minion still pinned without a single glance of concern. Her expression narrowed and she focused on Carlos, who stood just to the left of the room’s center in a rising shimmer of obsidian light that climbed up his body and wove around him like a dancing chorus of deadly vines. He seemed gigantic, enfolded in the shroud of his power, and the last of the bone constructs sparkled into dust as it touched him. Sparks snapped in the air around him as if he stood at the eye of an electric storm. The woman seemed unfazed, though she did keep her distance from him.
“Well done, Maggie Griffin,” Carlos said. “You saved your master from my wrath. For now.”
She tried to restrain a wince at his knowledge of her name, but if I saw it, Carlos had, too. Instead of replying, she spread her arms and the room shook as the rest of the bony figures on the walls pulled themselves loose from the plaster and stepped onto the floor, animated and enraged. They turned toward Carlos and me, clicking as they began to walk toward us, ignoring Quinton and Soraia. I was barely up when the nearest skeleton swung its arms, clawing at me. I dropped and swept its feet out from under it, but I was sweating with the effort, pulling against the hungry grip of the floor.
The bones scattered, not sticking this time, but now other bone constructs were close enough to grab at me. As I tried to manage the increasing number of fragile assailants, the skeleton
I’d just broken began drawing back together. I would have cursed, but I was already breathing too hard to want to waste my breath.
Griffin laughed. “Which of your friends will you save? You can’t possibly manage them both before the bones collect them.”
Carlos crouched on the floor, his hands rising, drawing black tendrils from the ground. Blood ran through the interstices of the bone mosaic, drawn toward him from the altar and from the place Soraia had bled onto the floor. Carlos slammed his palms onto the floor with the same gesture he’d used to frighten the dogs. The room shook and the skeletons shattered, bones tumbling to the ground.
Griffin narrowed her eyes and walked closer to me. I dodged to the side, running as best I could toward Quinton. A bone candelabrum tumbled to the ground, knocking me down and blocking the direct route to my lover and his niece. I shot a glance over my shoulder. Griffin smirked at me and made a clawing, clutching gesture. The floor beneath me heaved, knocking over more of the reeking candelabra. I was enclosed in a ring of fire and burning bones. It wasn’t as much of a barrier to me as it would have been to some, but it looked intimidating and I could feel the floor reaching for me again, tiny ivory spurs cutting through my thin shoes and skin, reaching for my bones. I danced aside, coming perilously close to the flames. I snatched another cold edge of the Grey between myself and the grasping bones, but it meant bending down, which put my face uncomfortably close to them. I could hear the whispers of their song as my Grey shield cut through them.
Carlos rose back to his full height. “Your ideas could not begin to encompass what I can ‘manage.’” He made another gesture, a small thing limned in blackness. The bones of the altar bent, bristling and snatching at her.
Griffin darted forward, startled, as the bones grabbed hold of the man pinned to the altar. He screeched as they touched him and began to pierce his flesh. He yanked his hand back from the cup, dislodging the knife a little as he tried to escape.
The dome of bone around Griffin’s master shivered on the floor.
Carlos smiled.
Griffin spun around, snatched the pitcher from the altar, and bashed it against her minion’s head with killing force, splattering the walls with crimson liquid that stank of sour wine and curdled blood. His skull smashed against the bristling altar and I was on my knees, choking and gasping as his death hit me. She never noticed, her attention focused on the bone shield at the center of the room.
Carlos made another small gesture, empowered by the presence of death as much as I was debilitated by it. The dome around Griffin’s master cracked and shivered.
Griffin put her hand on the bloodied skull of her dying companion and lifted a piece of it away, holding it tight enough to crush in her fist as she muttered under her breath. Hard shafts of white energy bolted upward and then plunged to the floor. For a moment, a black pit yawned around the dome of white in the center of the room, and the bone chapel shook, causing loose finger bones, skulls, and ribs to drop from the ceiling and fall into the hole until the blackness vanished again. Griffin smiled, an unpleasant, cold expression.
She turned and, as the man beside her died, she shoved the knife back down through his hand, repinning the spell to the cup and altar, and the white dome hardened again. But the floor had ceased to grasp for me and, with his passing, the man’s death no longer held me down.
“You are remarkably loyal in spite of your other flaws,” Carlos said, drawing Griffin’s attention back to him as I rolled through the spreading ring of fire and crawled to Quinton and Soraia.
“But this is a waste of effort. You cannot stand against me. Release the girl and I will not dine upon your soul tonight.”
“You really are sure of yourself, aren’t you, Mysterious Stranger?” Griffin replied, but her bravado was a sham, her voice rough as the coruscation of power around her fluttered. She’d burned through a lot of energy, but she wasn’t backing down.
Carlos laughed at her. “You already see that I can send you forth ‘to shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever. . . .’” Carlos pulled the broken crystal pendant from his pocket and held it up in the strange light of the room. “Even your master, swaddled in his shroud of bones, isn’t safe from me.”
Griffin twitched. “You threaten us with that?” she said, faking a laugh as she pointed at the pendant, moving her other hand to the side and out of his view. “It’s broken. You know that you’ll never get that little girl out of there without my say-so—which I won’t give if you harm him. And if you kill me, she’ll remain locked in that cage forever with your friends dead beside her, just more bones for our temple.”
There wasn’t going to be much of a temple left, I thought, as the flames continued spreading.
THIRTEEN
I reached Quinton and Soraia as a coil of white mist rose from the bones behind Carlos and the crystal began to sway in his grip. The mist started solidifying into a shape that seemed disturbingly familiar, like a small beast with scales and wings and a mouth full of vicious fangs. The blood and blackness of Carlos’s own power touched and wove into the shape as it came together faster, fleshing the skeleton of the Night Dragon. The silver chain of the pendant began to smoke.
Carlos dropped the crystal as the spectral dragon swooped.
Griffin laughed and sprang forward, more confident in spite of her flagging power. She’d obviously been working all night and, in spite of the venue, she was running out of steam. But she was laughing and it filled me with dread.
Carlos stepped aside, turning, and swiped through the dragon with a gleam of blackness as he crushed the crystal underfoot. I wound my hands into the white mass of Griffin’s spell that held Quinton to the floor and felt for the cold particle that held it in shape. My fingers burned as if I’d touched dry ice and I closed my aching hand around the linchpin of misery, removing it with a long, smooth pull. The spell crumbled into white dust around us and Quinton sucked in a lungful of air tainted with the increasing stench of burning flesh and bone.
As Quinton caught his breath, the nightmare thing that Griffin had unleashed wove through the air, but the blackness Carlos wielded cut its wing and it crashed to the ground, the bones—not pale green like the ones I’d seen before, but black and smoking—rebounding off the floor like hailstones as its borrowed darkness swarmed back to Carlos.
One of the wooden boxes burst into flame and the bones around the room began howling and singing as the heat and smoke rose. The box burned like a fuse and then collapsed. A screaming phantom shot up from the ruined box, arcing toward the ceiling to vanish through the roof. I could hear the distant chime and rattle of scales over silvery bones and feel the cold sweep of the Guardian Beast nearby, collecting the escaped revenant.
Griffin let out a moan, twisting and bending where she stood as if the broken illusions bore her down with them. The threads that linked her to the fallen Night Dragon dragged her to the floor, her burned energy weighing on her now. She raised her arms, and a fragile scaffold of bones arched over her.
I looked at Carlos, who had stooped to sweep up the rods of rutile that had scattered from the crushed crystal. He did not pause to see what had become of us, but gathered to him the fleeing darkness of the Night Dragon and its lines of control that connected it to Griffin, drawing the black shards of enchanted crystal into the baleful energy as if he were spinning yarn. The strand of his spell lengthened in his fingers, writhing around his hands like a snake looking for a place to strike. He caught it and wove it between his fingers like a cat’s cradle, twisting it as he murmured into the void between the filaments of death.
He pulled the intricate weave tighter, and Griffin crumpled with a strangled scream, her shield of bones collapsing and dissolving into the floor. The last of the uncanny light winked out, leaving only the stinking reek of the spreading fire from the fallen bone candles and the bleak glow of Carlos’s power to illuminate
the room.
Carlos strode to the altar and yanked the knife from the dead man’s hand. The corpse slumped to the floor in a spill of blood and brains. The white dome at the center of the room dissolved, but of the man who had occupied it there was no sign—only broken bones and dust that fell away into a hole in the floor where the dark void had been. Growling, Carlos returned to stand over Griffin, the trailing pearls of death and darkness thinning and disappearing behind him. “Release the girl and I will let you live. Today. Otherwise . . .” he added, and pulled harder on the filaments woven between his hands so the shape thinned and strained.
Griffin writhed and blanched, gasping. She made a gesture while choking out a few words, and the cage of bones and silver shivered. She clenched her teeth in useless fury.
As Soraia’s wretched prison shuddered, Quinton yanked one side open. It fell apart around her and she let out a thin cry, throwing herself into her uncle’s arms. The blood from her forearm smeared over his back.
As I helped Quinton to his feet, Carlos dropped the fabric of his working onto Griffin’s body and stepped back as she lay like a corpse beneath it. He walked away from her to look down at the remains of the bony tomb that had protected the floating man but now showed only a gaping pit in the floor. “Your aegis of bone allowed him to escape. He was blind to what happened here—which will obscure your failure for now, but Rui will not be pleased when he returns. He shouldn’t have let the beauty of the finish blind him to the essentially shoddy quality of your work, nor to your need to borrow a spell from someone else to hold me at bay. Were I you, I’d be gone before he returned. Not that running will save you. . . .”
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