Bone Walker

by Angela Korra'ti

  Praise for Bone Walker

  “Reminiscent of the classic War for the Oaks, Bone Walker features a diverse cast, a relatable world, and a fast-paced adventure. The only thing lacking is more sleep after you stay up all night reading it.”

  — Jody Wallace, author of Angeli

  “First of all, I can’t resist a book that opens with a character described as having a resemblance to a young Elvis Presley. That bad-boy mage aside, Angela Korra’ti’s Bone Walker is full of everything I love about urban fantasy. Fantastic world-building, some heroic (and geektastic) characters, adventure, and a fast-page-turning story. This follow up to Faerie Blood is not to be missed.”

  — Angela Campbell, author of the Psychic Detectives Series

  “Ever wonder if starting a series with the second book makes sense? I often do, but in the case of Angela Korra’ti’s Bone Walker it’s not a problem. Korra’ti makes it easy to slide into a charming Seattle populated with faeries and fox-people, Warders and bone walkers, and to follow half-fae Kendis as she tries to master her love life, her magic life, and a murderous threat. Dive in.”

  — Fraser Sherman, author of Philosophy and Fairy Tales

  Writing as Angela Korra’ti

  The Free Court of Seattle

  Faerie Blood

  Bone Walker

  Writing as Angela Highland with Carina Press

  The Rebels of Adalonia

  Valor of the Healer

  Vengeance of the Hunter

  Victory of the Hawk (forthcoming April 2015)

  Bone Walker

  Book Two of the Free Court of Seattle

  Angela Korra’ti

  LOW ORBIT PUBLICATIONS 2015

  Bone Walker

  is © 2015 Angela Korra’ti, all rights reserved

  Cover artwork: Kiri Moth

  Layout and book design: Dara Korra’ti

  Digital edition 1.0

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious; any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Valor of the Healer

  Cover Art and Cover Copy © 2013 by Harlequin Enterprises

  Vengeance of the Hunter

  Cover Art and Cover Copy © 2014 by Harlequin Enterprises

  All Cover Art and Cover Copy used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. ® and ™ are trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited or its affiliated companies, used under license.

  EPUB ISBN: 978-0-9864217-1-6

  Mobi ISBN: 978-0-9864217-0-9

  First printing, this edition, 2015

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed by Third Place Press

  Lake Forest Park, Seattle

  For Olo and André, the first two fiddles I’d call upon for any magical, musical duel. Vos violons sont les meilleurs violons, les gars.

  And once more for Marikat and Thom: Many thanks again for your support!

  Prelude

  In the end, locked away where the wind couldn’t reach his face and his eyes could not see stars, he had nothing left but his voice. The Queen of Air and Darkness being who she was, he was terrified she’d take even that. So he sang, hurling broken snatches of melody to his prison walls. He sang to remind himself what it could sound like, and of the words to songs that he loved. He sang in as many mortal languages as he could remember, for his love of human music had always set him apart. This was his last defiance, the last affirmation of his innermost self that he could muster.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t enough to chase the invading cold from his chest. Melorite was supposed to be dead; he’d seen her slain with his own eyes. But now he could taste her with each shuddering breath. Her laughter rippled across his mind, and if he let his guard slip for even an instant, he could feel her caressing his every thought.

  Didn’t you miss me, my sweet love? Aren’t you happy we’re together again?

  At first he tried to ignore that silken voice insinuating itself through his head, drowning it out with every last song he could bring to mind. But hunger, thirst, and exhaustion meant he couldn’t sing forever—and when his attention wavered, he felt her frost spread further and further through his flesh. He didn’t dare risk moving by her will rather than his own. Soon, this meant that he barely moved at all, and that he had no strength left for anything but singing.

  Soon, though, Melorite commanded even that.

  Sing for me, pretty bard. You know I always loved to hear you sing for the mortals. Not to mention for me.

  When he heard his own voice sliding where that inner urging willed, when each clear, sweet note came at the cost of her hold upon him growing, he began to despair.

  Physical torture alone he could have borne. But Luciriel in her august wisdom had never been one to break a body when she could break a spirit instead. And he was certain now that the Queen had crafted for him the most diabolical punishment possible.

  If left unchecked, that punishment was going to kill him.

  Laughter bubbled across his awareness at that certainty. Oh, but I don’t want to kill you yet. It’s been too long since I last had your body. And since I can’t have it the way I did before, I will have it this way now!

  His world went blank, all his thoughts white and empty and cold, and in that moment she was the absolute center of his universe.

  When he came back—not all the way, but enough to know who he was once more—he could think of nothing but escape. All his senses craved the light of the stars upon his face, and the taste of fresh air pulled into his lungs.

  Find it, my sweet! Take your chance!

  He could no longer tell whether the urge to flee was his in truth or born out of the cold that had taken up residence inside him. But it no longer mattered. Huddling against the wall of his cell, he waited. All the while, her voice murmured its encouragement, keeping him poised, ready to strike.

  Opportunity rose when the wards on his prison went down, and one of the Court’s servant goblins came through an opening portal to bring him a meager dinner. He’d lost track of his command upon his magic, but the instant the goblin appeared in the portal, his hands whipped up of their own accord. Lightning flared. The goblin screamed.

  Head spinning, limbs trembling, the prisoner hurled himself through the portal just before it closed.

  With the last few scraps of his consciousness, he flailed out blindly to seize control of the magic, to make it take him somewhere, anywhere else. He had nothing left in him to decide when or where with any cogent thought.

  But an image of rain-washed skyscrapers, hills, and lakes seized him with almost as much strength as the cold that commanded him now. With it, like a flash of sunlight, came a memory of golden eyes in a brown face.

  He remembered those eyes. He’d be safe with them.

  The portal latched upon that memory and took him where he needed to go.

  Chapter One

  “A-ha me boys a-riddle-aye-day!”

  Three thousand voices roared out the chorus, a tidal wave of melody that surged forward to crash against the four musicians up on the stage—and in instant reaction, like master mariners guiding their vessel through a storm, the quartet ripped into the bridge. Bouzouki chords bounced all over a driving bass line and the machine-gun rhythm from the bodhran, while unabashed delight resounded through every note of the reel in the accordion solo. The crowd picked up on that joy and returned it a hundredfold. All around me a sea of faces shone, hands clapped out the beat, and heads bobbed up and down as the music engulfed u
s all.

  Christopher’s favorite band had come to town, and the audience was having the time of its life.

  And I had to admit, so was I. The good humor and boisterous energy of the performers were infectious, and the music, irrepressible. I didn’t know the words to most of the songs, but on the strength of rhythm and melody alone, I was thrilled to clap and bounce along with everyone else. I didn’t even mind that mine was the only brown face in sight, or that half of the white girls in range were paying more attention to the man at my side than they were to the stage. Not that I could blame them. At six-two, clad in a black T-shirt emblazoned with the blue, red, gold, and white of the Newfoundland flag and cheerfully bellowing lyrics he knew far better than I did, Christopher MacSimidh was difficult to miss. He’d spruced up for the concert with a new shorter haircut that traded off his ponytail for front locks that dangled along his brow. For once he’d even shaved properly, baring an intriguing little dent in the line of his chin that I was certain was drawing the gaze of every straight woman and gay man at the show. It certainly kept drawing mine.

  All of this was incidental, though, to the energy my beau was pouring forth. Have you ever stood next to a Warder at the height of his elation, surrounded by equally delighted denizens of his bonded city? You’d know it if you did. Warder magic is life magic, and when it runs high, hearts and spirits lift, and limbs and voices find new vigor. That night at this concert, out in the open air of the Seattle Center with the living earth under our feet, it meant that every last person in earshot of Christopher’s baritone was finding the breath to sing and bounce at the same time. More than a few were singing not only on key, but also in harmony. The designated dancing area by the stage had overflowed three bars into the second song of the night, and no one was left on the blankets and lawn chairs spread across the gently sloping hill behind us.

  Me, I drank up that energy of Christopher’s like champagne, and it went to my head just as quickly. I wasn’t a Warder, but I was half Sidhe, with fey blood and magic that had awakened a scant two months ago. Christopher’s magic had come online along with mine when he’d been injured defending me and his blood had touched my skin along with Seattle earth. I could sense other fey, other sources of magic—but nothing filled my senses with sunlight quite like Christopher. Now we were a mixed-race couple in more ways than one: black girl and white boy, Sidhe and Warder, fey and human. Tonight, though, we were doing our best to be nothing more what we seemed: two people out to enjoy some damn fine music.

  For the most part, we pulled it off. Millicent, the senior Warder of Seattle and Christopher’s teacher—and by extension, mine—had flat out refused to let us loose at a public event until she was convinced we’d be able to keep enough of a lid on our magic that nothing much would spill out onto those around us. We’d practiced for three straight weeks to satisfy her, me even more than Christopher. The first time he’d kissed me, he’d promised to introduce me to the music of his home province of Newfoundland, and come hell or high water, I wasn’t going to ruin his chance to make good on his pledge. If the rest of the audience got a little more exuberant than they would have done without us around, I considered that a fair trade-off for the pleasure of dancing with Christopher to the music from the place of his birth.

  Which is why, when a pulse of ragged, unsteady power shot through my nerves, I almost tripped over his feet in shock.

  Christopher caught me before I bumped into the knot of teenage girls in front of us, and I could tell from the sudden rigidity of his hands that he’d felt that pulse too. Up on the stage, while the audience thundered its approval, the band closed out the current song on a perfect four-part chord. I paid none of them any attention. Instead I pulled Christopher close, stood on my toes, and whispered up into his ear, “What was that?”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  “Me neither.” As Millicent had drilled into both of us, I looked for any traces of stray energy threatening to escape me, just so I could lock them down. It didn’t help. I still felt something prickling in the air, pushing as if trying to break through from the other side of a wall. “Should we go find it?”

  I hated to ask; Christopher’s face fell the moment the words left my mouth. He threw a glance at the stage, where one of the singers was launching into the first verse of an unaccompanied sea shanty, and then he looked in all directions around us. But despite his hangdog expression his voice was firm as he said, “We’d better. C’mon, Kenna-lass.”

  He took my hand and guided us out through the crowd, begging the pardon of those we passed as politely as only a Canadian can. I followed, more than willing to let him lead. If something nearby was summoning power, that made it Warder business. Since Millicent wasn’t with us, Christopher was on tap. Daughter of a powerful Seelie mage I might have been, but when it came to Warder doings, I was more or less along for the ride. As the immediate noise of the crowd and the harmony from the band members faded a little behind us, the magic spiked up again, sharper than before, a clear beacon for us to follow.

  Nobody in immediate range looked out of the ordinary. In addition to the teenage girls, I saw any number of software geek types, several parents with young children cavorting around them, and a pair of enthusiastic dykes in matching brimmed caps, waving a sizable Cascadian flag between them. When it came down to it, I was the strangest-looking thing in the vicinity, and not only because of my brown skin. Fortunately, nobody nearby was likely to notice the pointed ears hiding under my hair or my topaz-yellow eyes. People had a way of failing to notice those, and I hadn’t even had to practice that.

  No one noticed, either, that I wasn’t the only fey-blooded member of the audience. Suspicious, sparkling flutters in the branches of the trees around us betrayed the presence of fairies attracted to the music, singing high and sweet along with us all. On the way into the show I’d spotted at least two more of the humanoid fey Millicent had allowed into Seattle. One was an older woman of whom Millie had told me nothing except that she had a vested interest in straying no farther than absolutely necessary from Puget Sound, and the other was a little fellow barely four feet high yet possessed of so much shaggy white beard that I couldn’t see anything of his face except a pointed nose. Neither had magic above and beyond that of a fey creature’s basic existence, at least nothing my own could sense.

  Come to think of it, I had my doubts that the band’s lead singer was completely vanilla human. There was a jewel-like gleam to his merry eyes and a certain compelling resonance to the tenor he let loose on us even as he sang backup for his compatriot. But then, stage charisma itself was a powerful magic, and both of those singers had it in spades.

  Stage charisma, though, wasn’t causing the power surge. Nobody around us could possibly have been its source—nobody looked distressed enough. Whatever this magic was, it felt strained, rising and then ebbing again, but with each pulse gathering an almost wild kind of strength. Nor were we the only ones to have sensed something, for some of the fairies in the trees reacted as we passed. A small flock of them trailed after us in curiosity, but held their distance. They vanished right back into the nearest protective branches whenever I looked their way. With as much magic as I was packing, I tended to make fairies and other tiny fey nervous. Tonight, though, they seemed even more unsettled by the raw power roiling through the air.

  Seattle Center is full of distinctive buildings and landmarks, the most famous being, of course, the Space Needle. We wound our way past a few of them to follow where the magic led, away from the Mural Amphitheater and the Space Needle’s shadow, and north past the massive International Fountain. Even at this hour the fountain was running, and the rush of its spray almost drowned out the echo of music from the concert we’d abandoned. It could not, however, drown out the magic. Christopher picked up the pace as we went by, his face tensing further with every step. As I broke into a trot to keep up with his longer stride, I began to worry. The last time we’d felt magic this strong, my mad uncle Malandor had almost sacrif
iced us both to a fertility demon. And here I was, trying to be a normal girl out with her normal boyfriend seeing a perfectly normal show. Magic and demons? Not part of the plan.

  There were others out and about on the Center grounds, coming into or out of the concert, or just part of the active nightlife of Seattle. But no one got close enough to us that we had to care. No one at all was nearby as we skidded to a halt at one end of a narrow service alley, which was a relief. Less of one was the sheen of brightness floating before us, an illumination that had nothing to do with the lighting from the manmade sources all over the grounds. If light could be said to writhe, then this light did. The formless shape of it twisted five feet up from the asphalt, coruscating through eldritch shades of blue, from pale to dark and back again.

  “Something’s coming through,” Christopher breathed.

  Only then did I realize what I was looking at: a portal.

  I’d seen portals before, opening and closing between our world and Faerie—and in the case of the aforementioned demon, between our world and some other place I did my best not to think about. But each of those had been magic wielded by adepts, cleanly defined, solidly controlled. This was something else entirely, a fraying of the walls between the worlds, growing wider and clearer with each moment.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not very good at it.” Easy for me to say, when I barely had down how not to look conspicuous in front of strangers, much less opening doors out of nothing. Still I let the point stand.

  “Or it doesn’t know what it’s doing. It could be hurt or out of its head. Either way I’m on it.” Christopher took a step forward and then looked down at me. All traces of the boyish glee he’d shown among the concertgoers had vanished from his face, replaced by a look of stern and earnest business. “Are you up for it, then?”