Bone Walker

by Angela Korra'ti

  “She would have used them to raise her as an alokhiu. What’s left of her would be linked to them now. Destroy the bones, and we destroy the remnant of her spirit. She’ll be at rest. Permanently.”

  A tangle of emotion I couldn’t begin to unravel tightened Elessir’s features as he uttered each hollow-toned word, so softly that I could barely hear him. All I could think as I watched him was that whether he had loved her was far too personal a question to ask. “How did she die?” I asked instead.

  Mirthlessly, his attention never leaving the name carved into the stone before him, Elessir smirked. “At the Queen’s hand, of course. Melorite was always a better mage than I—and more ambitious as well. I simply wanted out of the Court. She wanted to rule it.” He looked at me then, with a gaze every bit as tired as I felt. “As much as I hate that you had to do it, you were wise to keep from defying Luciriel. She does not take well to challengers.”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly brimming over with options.”

  “Yet you included me as a condition of your bargain, even if not quite as Her Majesty proposed. You could have left me in her power.”

  Once again I did my best to shrug him off. “Not so much. I don’t like seeing anyone bullied, even you.” Change topics, the back of my brain immediately chimed in, flashing every warning sign I could think of across my mind’s eye. Detour. No unauthorized access. Beach logs kill. “So if we’re meant to use the bones, how are we supposed to get at them?”

  Out of general nervousness I had yet to actually touch the stone that bore the name of the dead Sidhe, taking my cue from Elessir himself. If this was Luciriel’s ossuary, and if she called dibs on the bones of Unseelie mages, it stood to reason that they’d be protected against any contact but her own…

  Unless she’d cleared it, that is.

  Drawing in my breath, I held out my hand to the stone without touching it quite yet. There was no handle on this or any of the other panels, no subtle depressions in the carved stone that might have hidden trigger mechanisms. I didn’t bother to look past the one that faced us, and I didn’t have to ask if it was Warded. Cool, stinging magic radiated from the stone to my open palm, unnerving me all over again, for it made me think of refrigeration cabinets in morgues.

  “Do you know what kind of Wards she sets on these?” I said, not yet ready to risk physical contact, not until I absolutely had to.

  “The Queen never limits herself to one kind,” Elessir replied, which was no help at all. “She changes them as she wills. If the Ward doesn’t recognize you, it could do anything from paralyzing you to transforming you into whatever shape currently best serves her whims. Or, it might simply melt off your hand.”

  Not encouraging. In fact, the very opposite of encouraging. “If this makes me explode,” I told Elessir, carefully avoiding his gaze because I really didn’t want to see how he might react, “tell Christopher I said I love him.”

  Then I pressed my palm against the stone.

  Never once in my life had I been foolish enough to touch my tongue to a frozen light pole or street sign—but when the Ward triggered, for one frantic instant, that was exactly what it felt like I’d done. Cold speared up the length of my entire arm, freezing me in place much as Elessir had warned it might, and clamping into my muscles with brutal strength. I would have screamed if I’d been able to breathe. As it was, my jaw began to spasm.

  In the next moment, though, the numbing cold retreated. Not to anything resembling warmth, but enough at least to release my hand. I snatched it back, wrapping both my arms around myself to try to stifle my shivering. As I watched, a hole appeared in the stone panel’s center, growing progressively wider and taller until every last inch of the stone rippled and vanished into the surrounding marble.

  For once Elessir had no sardonic remark. Given what came into view as the panel disappeared, I was speechless myself.

  There were no bones revealed to us. There was a skull, though, and at the sight of it, after a few tries, I found my voice. “That can’t be real. It’s too…” I flailed for words, trying to figure out why I was staring at something so delicate and so pure a white that it seemed made of porcelain rather than a substance that had once been housed in living flesh. Weakly, I finished, “It’s too dainty.”

  “We’re not human,” Elessir reminded me. “Don’t expect our bone structures to match what you might have been taught in school.” His mouth curled. “Also, the Queen would not have stored it in anything less than pristine condition.”

  I snorted. “Naturally. Well. So far so good.” Famous last words, of course, but I didn’t think about that; I was too busy trying not to think very closely about Elessir’s ‘we’. Thusly occupied, I lifted the skull from the soft velvet cushion upon which it rested.

  And as soon as my fingertips touched the lifeless ivory, I saw her—

  * * *

  Oh all right, I was willing to admit, he was looking svelte tonight. I’d never beheld a male, Seelie, Unseelie, human, or any other race that walked the earth, that could pull off such understated mortal evening wear with such aplomb. He disdained the powdered wigs, the lavish brocaded jackets, and the square-toed shoes that the noble-born men of this nation favored, all of which were gaudy and clumsy compared to the fashions of the Court. Yet even in a simple waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and boots that might as well have been molded to his feet—the only item of Sidhe make he was wearing—my Elessir commanded the stage. And the instant he began to sing, his humble attire became utterly immaterial. I’d humor quite a bit for the sake of that delectable voice—not that I’d ever tell him that.

  And from the rapt worship on their faces, it was ridiculously plain that every mortal female in the concert hall and at least five of the males were ready to divest him of those clothes. On any other night, I might have amused myself with the game of guessing which of them he’d thrall, overloading their senses with the power he threaded through the aria until they’d have no idea what gifts they’d offer him, or even what composer’s work he’d sung. Tonight, however, I had no intention of sharing him. I’d let him finish the performance. As human languages went, Italian fell more pleasantly upon the ear than others. The new Handel oratorio was deft and nimble, almost worthy of his skill.

  After he was done, I would claim him. His mortal sycophants would have to wait.

  Oh, they showered him with roses on his final notes. They wept and screamed the name he was using on London’s streets. Yet they made way for me as I strode down the aisle between the seats, for I didn’t scruple to send power streaming out from me in my wake. It cleared my path to my darling consort, and that was all that mattered—that, and the flare of alarm in his eyes as he saw me coming. He quickly suppressed it, but not before I answered it with an anticipatory smile, just enough to give him a taste of my hunger—

  * * *

  —And I shook my head, hard, trying to clear the fragment of vision from my inner sight. It had been bad enough to hear that carnality in Jude’s voice. My own mind submerged in it, even for a few passing seconds, was worse. “Jesus,” I croaked, “I need better Wards.”

  “You’ll learn to build them,” Elessir said. He was shrugging out of his jacket, and even as I blinked at him, trying to reorient, he plucked the skull from my hands and wrapped it in denim. “But unless the Queen has already arranged it too, you’re going to have to learn something else first.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He paused, cocked his head at the silence around us, and then smirked. “As there is a distinct lack of gates opening in our immediate vicinity, and I myself am currently incapable of doing so, it’s on you to get us—” For a fraction of an instant, so briefly I wasn’t sure I had seen it at all, he caught himself. “To get us out of here.”Had he been about to say ‘home’? Yet another question I didn’t want to approach, and he’d thrown the additional and much bigger curveball of gates, anyway. “Wait, what, me? Pal, I’ve never opened a gate before! Do you want to tr
ust it to a newbie? What if I dump us in Saskatchewan or fuck up the timing?” I heard myself getting shrill, but didn’t bother to hold it back. The thought of getting home again, only a hundred years later, nearly choked me with a rush of panic.

  “I can walk you through it, Miss Thompson.” Elessir cradled the jacket-bundle in the crook of his left arm and then held out his right hand to me. “Can you trust me?”

  Speaking of panic. I blinked up at him and then down at his hand. I let out a ragged breath. Touching him again was the worst of bad ideas, but hell, I’d just sworn an indeterminate number of my future years to a vacation in the Unseelie Court. All things considered, Elessir a’Natharion seemed less scary now by comparison. So I took his hand by way of reply, squared my shoulders, and asked, “How do we do this?”

  To my relief, his attention stayed focused, and so did mine; there was no return of the wild urge to embrace him. “You need to visualize, as clearly and distinctly as you can, where you want to go. Think of it as a room you want to walk to in another part of your house.”

  That part was easy enough. I wanted to be right back in the park we’d just left, with Millicent and Jake and Carson, and oh God, I wanted to hug Christopher until neither of us could breathe, and then I wanted to wrap myself around him and hide somewhere safe for an entire month. But first I had to get back to him, and then we had to do something about the alokhiu, and did I mention the part where I was so very, very tired?

  Right. Kobe Terrace Park. Christopher. Focus, girl!

  “I got it,” I murmured. I hoped.

  Elessir nodded just to the left of us, at the open air between us and another bank of the panels with their unreadable names. “Imagine there’s a door or a curtain right there, or a panel just like all the ones here. Beyond it is where you want to take us—so call your power, and open that door, or curtain, or panel. Make it big, so we can both step through.”

  As lesson plans went, this one lacked a certain something—like, oh, say, concrete details—and I shot the Unseelie a caustic look. But he stared back at me in utmost earnestness, an uncomfortable indication that this was likely going to be all the detail I was going to get.

  When I closed my eyes and reached for my magic, though, the problem became much simpler. Here in this ancient dwelling of the Queen of the Unseelie, surrounded by so much background power, it’d been easy to overlook mine. The moment I actively sought it, it thundered up in response to my one anguished thought: that Christopher was going to be out of his mind with worry. And I might have been in Faerie, a place where the very air was permeated with magic, but I could feel Christopher’s missing.

  I thought of him, of his oak-strong Warder energy, and I realized with a pang that not once in the last two months had I ever felt its lack. More than anything, more than my house or Seattle’s green trees or even my big monster of a cat, Christopher’s magic always told me when I was home.

  Go home, I ordered my magic. Find him.

  Brilliance exploded into being, but not in any cohesive, door-like shape; rather, it engulfed Elessir and me, throwing us both into sharp relief. Reality wavered around us. A massive sense of pulling roared up from somewhere deep within me, and because I was clasping his hand, it caught him up in its wake. His eyes went wide, and that was a new surprise, because I’d never seen him look at me with outright awe.

  “Miss Thompson,” he blurted, “would I have been so terrible an enticement?”

  The question was strangely casual and quiet against the wildfire halo of magic pulling us somewhere else. For an instant, surrounded by radiance of my own power’s making, I had to wonder what exactly was going through the bard’s mind to put such an open, unmasked look upon his face. “No,” I admitted. I paused, then offered him a sheepish little half-grin. “And by the way, you might as well call me Kendis.”

  I had just enough time to see him break into a heartbreakingly beautiful smile before we vanished into the light.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When the pull released us, when the magic and the light subsided, Elessir and I were in far different surroundings than the ossuary we’d just left. Where we were, in fact, I had no earthly idea. Trees surrounded us on all sides save for a broad stretch of water immediately to the east—a lake I didn’t know. Nor could I tell what time it was, aside from full-on night. The sky overhead was heavy with clouds, through which neither stars nor moon could be seen. Wind whipped along the length of the paved trail where the portal dumped us, hitting our faces with rain as soon as my power let us go.

  I had to squint against the glare. But once it was gone and my eyes had adjusted, I quickly realized I hadn’t been the only source of light on the trail. A red LED flashed off and on just a few yards ahead of us. That LED was attached to the front of a jacket.

  A jacket worn by the crumpled form of Christopher.

  Most likely I screamed. I didn’t even notice as I leapt forward and threw myself down to my knees at his side, pulling him up into my arms. He was soaked and shivering, and his magic swirled off of him in feeble little tendrils. The greater channel of it, the link that usually tied him to Seattle’s earth, was stretched so thin that I feared it was about to break.

  But he was alive. My magic sensed it before the rest of me did, for his latched onto it the instant I touched him. Only when I wailed out his name and kissed him, heedless of the falling rain, did he actually stir. And only then did I begin to cry.

  “Kenna,” he mumbled, his voice groggy. Between the LED and the roil of power between us, I had more than enough light to get a good look at him, and my heart contracted painfully in my chest. On top of being drenched, he had several days’ worth of beard roughening his face, and acute exhaustion shadowed his eyes. He locked a wild, delirious gaze onto my face. He breathed my name once more in disbelief and hope.

  Then he sat up and crushed me against his chest, so tightly that I felt him trembling against me. But that frantic burst of energy lasted him only a few seconds. I wailed again as he slumped hard against me.

  “Christopher? Oh God, what’s wrong? Where the hell are we? Christopher!”

  “Miss Thompson, think.” Elessir crouched just behind me, and to my surprise, he laid the denim jacket he’d just been wearing over Christopher, giving him an extra layer of warmth. “He’s a Warder. There’s not much that can lay a Warder out, but surely you know what can!”

  I didn’t miss what he’d chosen to call me. Nor did I miss that the surrender of his jacket now meant he was carrying Melorite’s skull in his bare hands. But I couldn’t spare mental space to care about either problem, not right then. Stroking Christopher’s hair and temples, bathing him in all the power I could summon as if that might keep the rain off of us both, I said, “We must not be in Seattle. The city would support him if we were. Goddamnit! Where are we and how’d he get here?”

  My phone, at least, could answer the first question. I didn’t want to break contact with Christopher in the slightest, but I had to free a hand to fish the phone out of my pocket; asking Elessir to fetch it for me was so very much not an option. That I still had the thing at all was a surprise, and so was its absolute failure to come out of sleep mode when I hit the power button. Bricked. I’d forgotten about the penchant Sidhe magic had for taking out phones, and apparently that included travel by gate.

  Right on the heels of that, though, I felt a telltale vibration somewhere on Christopher’s body—his phone. I let out a strangled little cry and ran my hand under Elessir’s jacket, all over his shuddering form, till I found the pocket where he’d stowed the device.

  The number on the screen, I saw in a surge of desperate relief, was Millicent’s. I nearly dropped the thing in my haste to answer the call. “Oh my God, oh my God, Millie, it’s me, help!”

  “Girlie, it’s about goddamn time you showed up again,” the Warder First’s voice barked in my ear. “Is the boy with you? I can’t sense him from here!”

  “I’ve got him! We’re out on a trail, wait, I don�
�t know where we are.” Since Christopher’s phone had signal, I found its map app and narrowed in where we were: somewhere on the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish, which was in turn just east of Bellevue. “We’re by Lake Sammamish. He’s out cold but I’ve got him. Elessir is here. What the hell happened?”

  “Honey,” Millicent advised, all at once sounding very tired, “you’d better check the date on that phone.”

  That stopped me cold, above and beyond the chill of the rain and the wind. With shaking fingers, I brought up the calendar on the tiny screen.

  The date was almost a month later than it should have been.

  My heart in my throat, I showed the screen to Elessir and then whispered back into the phone, “Millie, you… you’re going to have to tell me what I missed.”

  “Later. Priority one is getting the boy back on our ground, so sit tight. I’m sending Jake and Carson to you.”

  * * *

  Fortunately, we didn’t have long to wait.

  Carson called Christopher’s number within a minute of Millie hanging up, though I had to hand the phone off to Elessir. Christopher clung to me too hard, with his arms and his magic alike, for me to spare much attention for anything else. It turned out that Marymoor Park was just a short walk north along the trail from where we were—or at least, what would have been a short walk under normal circumstances. As it was, it took far longer than it should have done for me to coax Christopher to his feet so that we could get him to the nearest parking lot where the boys could meet us.

  Déjà vu much? That was all the hysteria I allowed myself, with Christopher staggering hard against me as we made our way along the trail. This time, though, I had Elessir to help me prop him up on the other side. And this time, the problem was going to be more easily fixed than a troll-induced concussion.

  At least, I hoped.

  My housemates were waiting when we reached the parking lot. Both of them looked almost as ragged around the edges as Christopher, though they lit up at the sight of me. I wanted to hug the both of them, panicked as I was at the news that I’d lost almost a month. But my arms were full of Christopher, and I didn’t dare let him go.