“Of course you don’t.” He clutched my arm suddenly with his free hand and flung me through the open doorway with a surge of red energy.
I tumbled over the sill and rolled into the darkness, hoping I could gain an advantage and jump him as he came through the door, but Rui was prepared for me. The lights snapped on, making me blink as he stepped into the room. Although I lunged for him anyhow, he fended me off with a rough thrust of clattering bones that flew from the floor like a fence and shoved me back. The door closed with a sound like doom.
TWENTY-FIVE
The room was something more akin to a torture chamber than a hospital operating room, though there were aspects of both present. The bones arranged around the walls and scattered on the floor definitely tipped it over into horror-movie territory. A large book bound in bone and skin lay on a small lectern as if in a pulpit, the atmosphere around it black as murderous thoughts. I saw tables and instruments in the normal world; piles of bones, pools of blood, and seething, unformed ghost-stuff in the Grey, but nothing that looked like a way out short of a body bag. Cold panic swelled over me as wailing ghosts rushed to surround me, patting and snatching at me with incorporeal hands that left ice in their wake.
Rui smiled, more crooked teeth and a gleam of blood-tinged delight in his eye. “When I was a child,” he said, “I knew that the story was supposed to frighten me into behaving and never straying from doing as my parents and my grandmother told me to do. But to me, the girl was a hero. She learned even from those who did not wish to teach her and she turned their strength against them when she seemed powerless. I also learned more than my masters wished me to and used their tricks to gain power over them. One in particular left me to dwindle and stagnate, cursing me, hoping to weaken my power by refusing to teach me further. He alone eluded my revenge, and you, my beautiful creature, will help me have it. Please remove your clothes.”
“What?” I said, gaping at him as I backed toward the farthest reaches of the room and openly looked for any way, however Grey or obscure, to get out of there and away from Rui.
“Unless you wish to walk about in a tattered and bloodstained dress when I’m done, you’d be wise to remove it now.”
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“Not your body. I have a great deal more for you to do, once you’re perfected and your soul stored away for Purlis’s collection. I think he’ll be particularly pleased to add you to it—since you and your friends destroyed most of my work when you burned down my temple.” His voice rose and sharpened in anger and the red spikes in his aura reached upward like fountains of blood. “It amuses me that his ridiculous scheme will bring our Great Plan to fruition and has finally brought my last enemy within reach.”
“Carlos? All this is about . . . getting even with Carlos?”
“There is so much more than that, but that one small thing adds such savor. He was my master and he abandoned me. I had to teach myself, just like the girl in the story. But he never would have expected me to be stronger for it. He cursed me, tied me to the land of my birth so I could never travel to the great bone churches to sit at the feet of another master, never pursue him, and yet . . . he returned.” Rui chuckled. “Oh, how I will relish using you against him. It’s even worth losing my student and the little girl to do it.”
His laughter escalated into a cackle of sadistic glee. He yanked the lines of energy that spun from his hands to my bones, dragging me toward a table that reminded me more of the equipment in the mortuary than anything from a doctor’s office. “It’s time for you to do as you’re told, senhorina.”
I made enough of a fuss that he had to work to haul me in, but not so much that I exhausted myself. My hope of escape was ragged, but it wasn’t gone yet. As long as he had his bone hooks or an energetic tie to me, I couldn’t go anywhere without him pulling me back, or hunting me down. I had to break the strands that connected us or get him to do it.
Rui seemed to be enjoying himself, grinning as he forced me onto the table. The whole setup reminded me of The Pit and the Pendulum and made me regret all those Roger Corman films I’d watched with reprehensible boyfriends in college. Rui, having gotten me on the table, strapped me down at the wrists and ankles.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, letting panic color my voice. “Why are you doing that? You don’t have to do that—you already have control over me.”
“Ah, but the sounding is easier if I don’t have to maintain your restraints as well. The little burrowers change the tones and I want to know everything about your bones. A few straps won’t interfere once I’ve removed the hooks.” He stoked my shoulder and upper arm, smiling. “Lovely, lovely bones . . .”
I felt sickened. I kicked and struggled and thrashed, but it didn’t gain me one centimeter of slack. It did, however, grant me a view into a few obscure corners of the Grey and across the edges of the temporaclines that lay in the room. He dropped the white threads that connected us and seemed to draw fine white spirals from my body, like ivory worms. I gasped and writhed, but there was as much show as actual pain and disgust—I needed to distract him while I studied my options. If I could get into the Grey long enough while unencumbered with Rui’s hooks and threads, I might be able to escape through the correct temporacline and, though he might find me again, he wouldn’t be able to hold me. . . .
He didn’t bother with my clothes and I guessed that his request that I remove them had been more of a psychological tactic than a necessity. He did take off my shoes, though, and in a moment I knew why.
Whispering sharp, black words, he smoothed his hand very lightly over the top surface of my left foot. As his hand passed, it felt as if my bones strained toward his palm like iron filings rising toward a magnet. I yelped, as much in surprise as pain. I wasn’t sure, at first, that I heard a whistling, singing sound, but it grew louder as he moved his hand up toward the larger bones of my leg.
My left shin lurched upward, and I shouted in startled pain as the bone yanked toward his hand violently, sending out a loud, low tone like a clarinet.
“Ah, that is interesting. Nearly the same as the one Purlis gave,” he said, allowing my bones to fall back into their normal position. “Remarkable that this bone should sound the same as that of a man with legs so much shorter than yours.”
I was panting and tears blurred the edges of my vision. “I broke it . . . when I was a kid,” I said. I’d also screwed up the knee a few years earlier and done any number of other injuries to the joint over the years, but I didn’t think I had to tell him.
“So I see,” Rui replied, touching my leg again right over the place the bone had snapped when I took a dive off a stage. He moved his fingers up and down the line of the bone at that spot, wringing from me a wailing chord of the bone’s song mixed with my own shrieking.
Rui smiled at the sound as if it were heavenly music. “Ah, I must find the right one. . . .”
He put his free hand on my other leg and that bone also jerked toward him, wrenching the joints at knee and ankle and sending another jolt of pain through me as my bones sang a discordant chord, out of tune with my howls of agony. He “played” up and down my tibias for a few moments, replaying every bit of damage I’d taken in the joints and connecting bones over the years, but he was unable to find a more pleasing resonance. He slid his hands around, first displacing my fibulas, then moving upward over my distressed knees—which he rejected and moved past immediately. I almost sighed in relief, except that there was none: His hands slid up my thighs and elicited more reedy tones from my femurs as I screamed.
It was hard to concentrate on finding a sign of a useful temporacline when every movement of Rui’s hands on my body racked me with new colors of anguish. He passed his hands over my hips and up the sides of my ribs, then ran his fingers over them in an excruciating glissando. He toyed with the loud bones of my chest until my voice was cracking. Then he slid one palm flat betwe
en my breasts, stroking the length of my sternum. Unable to scream now, I whimpered, and tears ran from the outer corners of my eyes in hot streams.
“Smaller, smaller . . .” he murmured. “A pity about the scar . . .” I thought I could feel the memory of a ghostly knife that had once scored my breastbone. Then he pulled his hands away and stared down at me, his eyes darting from point to point, seeking something.
“What?” I whispered.
“The key. The one bone that aligns to one of mine. How else will I tune you? How else will I bind these songs together? I must have that one for Coca.”
I knew I’d heard the word. . . . What was it . . . ? Not the soft drink . . . “Coca,” I repeated.
“The dragon,” he answered, offhandedly. “Inferno Dragão. The legends align. But there will be no Sleeping King to save them. Only the fiery Coca, before which all others will fail. You see what a clever plan it is? Take their own myth and turn it against them? The dragon has already eaten the knight! He cannot save them!”
“Eaten the knight . . . Oh. The tomb at the monastery,” I whispered, thinking out loud. “But . . . the bones weren’t really King Sebastian. . . .”
“Of course not. A common soldier, but buried as a king. The dust of a great deception will make it seem to burn like flesh.”
He turned away from me in frustration and snatched a bone off another table. As he raised it, I could see it was carved into a flute with rows of strange, blood-red characters running down the length.
He held it up, his eyes shining. “Do you see? This is my own song. I drew this bone from my own body, carved it to my own song. And its twin will lie in our dragon.”
I gaped at him, but I couldn’t see that he was in any way crippled or missing a significant bone—even though the flute was small, it wasn’t as small as a finger bone or one from the ear, and I couldn’t spot where it had come from.
His expression bloomed into delight as he saw me looking, as if my understanding was a thing of joy for him. “You’re clever. I found others to take their places. I have sacrificed for the work, but I couldn’t finish if I left my own body broken. Purlis believes he can control the drache by giving one bone, but I have given three—keys to the song. I hear the melodic complement in you—small, like a grace note—and I will take that for our dragon, too. Not a key, but it will be beautiful. No, no . . . It will be exultant. I will exult you. You will be perfected.”
He was enthralled with his idea and didn’t hear my muttered, “I’d rather remain flawed.”
He brought the macabre instrument to his mouth and blew, working his way through the tones, each seeming to flay me and touch my skeleton like live wires.
Dark shapes and ivory vapor oozed out of the pipe as he played a disturbing tune that made my spine ache. As the coil of magic wafted closer, the pang intensified and spread. It felt as if my skeleton were vibrating, every bone separately at high speed. The tormenting song rattled and hummed into my body, making me arch and writhe in pain as my joints seemed to be tearing themselves apart. One clear, piercing tone seemed to cut into the ring finger of my left hand like a physical blade, the bone shivering and ringing with the same note until the very fingertip was as cold as ice, singing back to the flute. It felt as if the farthest bone of that finger no longer belonged to me, although it was still attached.
The spell of Rui’s music wove through and wrapped me, crawling through my bones until it reached my stinging left hand, which shook and jerked without any impetus from me. Constrained so close to my side, the twitching hand fought to rise, falling back to pound the table and then fly upward again as the rest of my body drew tighter and tighter in a bow of anguish.
Rui pounced on my thrashing hand, dropping the flute to the floor. He yanked the restraints away and dragged me off the table, toward another part of his chamber. Released from the torment of the song, I went limp on the floor, falling into a heap. Without a glance at me, Rui dragged me forward by the wrist, far stronger than I’d anticipated of such a small man.
The bone flute rolled ahead of us toward a butcher block and Rui pulled me in its path. He heaved me up, yanking my hand onto the surface. I fell back down, too enervated to manage any resistance and too stubborn to contribute to whatever he had in mind.
“Stand up!” he snapped at me.
I shook my head and lay on the floor. “Too tired . . .”
He let out a growl of frustration and threw my hand down as he turned aside again, saying, “Selfish, useless creature.” He grabbed for something and I didn’t bother to look to see what it was. I snatched up the bone flute in my right hand, shoving it into the pocket of my dress, and dropped toward the Grey now that I was free—or nearly—of his hooks and strands of control.
“No!” he shouted, and I felt the bone-web prison try to close on me again as it had at the zoo, but he could not force me to the ground. I could feel the peculiar cold in the tip of my left ring finger, and before he could crush me or catch me by that resonance, I pushed back up to the normal, rising to my feet. I mustered all the strength I had left to stand and pick up the knife that lay on the block. Rui was too far away for me to use it on him, so I slammed the blade down on the farthest joint of my left ring finger. The tip of my finger fell off the edge of the butcher block in a spurt of blood and the drawing, tingling cold of Rui’s last connection vanished.
I threw myself into the Grey and rolled into the temporacline I’d been watching, dropping away from Rui’s chamber of horrors, free for the cost of my fingertip.
TWENTY-SIX
I had exchanged one type of paranormal cold for another and spent more of my own blood. I was free of Rui—at least until he wanted to try to track me by the song of my bones again—though I wasn’t sure how well that would work now that he no longer had his flute or a resonant connection to me. I had the impression he’d have to be pretty close to listen for me in the song of Portugal’s Grid, so the farther I got from him, the better my chances. I could have put an end to his tracking option by breaking a few of my bones, I supposed, but I was damaged enough as it was and now I was also bleeding from an amateur amputation. While I do heal preternaturally fast, I didn’t think that was going to save me today.
But without Rui’s traps and connections, I could drop deeper into the Grey and look for energetic signs that might get me closer to Quinton and Carlos faster. I couldn’t travel far or for long in the Grey even at the best of times—it was chilling, exhausting, and dangerous—and right now I was vulnerable. I needed to get back to the comparatively safe world of the normal—safe, that is, once I was far enough away from Rui.
Tired, shaking, and worried about what might come after me next, I crawled through the temporacline, swarmed by ghosts, until I seemed to be outside the current building. Then I slipped out of the frozen blade of time and dropped deeper into the Grey, awash in a silver fog of nascent souls and shrieking phantoms following the trail of my blood. I’d never bled in the Grey before and I hadn’t been sure that every hungry thing within it would come drooling after me like a pack of hunting dogs. I probably should have guessed, though. I needed to get out again, quickly, before anything nastier than a few ghosts caught up to me.
I could see the wild tangles of energy that were humans and mages rushing around on my right and the sweep of distant darkness that was probably the river. It was too far for me to reach. I looked in another direction—northeast, I thought. And there, like a ridiculous beacon, was a blazing pink line that led to a frantic coil of brilliant blue shot with arcs of orange and red. I couldn’t think of anyone else in all of Portugal to whom I would have a pink familial connection aside from Quinton. I fixed the shape in my sights and moved toward it as fast as I could, rising from the Grey and dragging a train of bleeding, biting specters as I went.
I tumbled out in a cold rush of blood-gorged ghosts, into the falling dusk at the edge of a thick planting of trees. Quin
ton had been crouching in the undergrowth and turned to look for the source of the whimpering sound I made as I hit the ground and felt the normal world jar my aching, abused bones and joints. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was enough. His expression was grim as he prepared to do any violence necessary to get to me . . . and there I was without his having to manage any at all.
Quinton threw himself forward, scooping me to his chest as we both sprawled on the ground. “Harper. Harper,” he kept saying, kissing my face as if he hadn’t seen me in years. “I thought they were killing you. I felt—horrible things. Dear God, are you all right?”
“No,” I whispered. My voice was still a wreck. I held up my bleeding hand. “Lost a finger, screamed myself hoarse.”
Quinton grabbed my hand and wrapped something around the end of my chopped-short finger—some cloth that he tightened into a makeshift tourniquet with a pen and a piece of duct tape from his pockets.
“I felt that. The finger. Who did it? Rui? My father?”
“I did.”
He stared at me, confused and a little freaked-out. “Why?”
“Long story. Get me out of here. Please.”
I barely managed to keep on my own bare feet and not need to be carried away. Quinton led me down a hillside and out to the edge of a road where a tiny car was parked. It barely had room inside for two adults and a box of chocolate, but since we had no chocolate, we fit.
I felt dizzy. I patted the door pillar of the passenger seat as Quinton drove. “This . . . ? How?”
“Stole it.”
“Hidden depths . . .”
“Not so hidden. You always knew I was shady.”
I nodded and my head felt wobbly on my neck.
After a half hour or so, he pulled the car over and loosened the tourniquet for a few minutes before tying it back down and driving on. “You’re in bad shape, but I don’t want you to lose the hand to gangrene. There’s no medical kit in this car or I’d do more.”
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