I stared, for a moment unsure what I was looking at. I saw depressions for eyes, a hard jaw and rows of teeth . . . but it was all wrong, and eerie.
Yes, there was a head in the bowling bag. A skull.
But it was carved from crystal. And it did not look human.
“Groovy,” I said. “But what the hell?”
The demon tore her gaze away, trembling. Moments later, I also started quivering—unable to help myself as a tiny tsunami rolled over every inch of my skin. Zee stretched and rippled, as did the rest of the boys, all of them tugging, pulling, struggling toward the crystal skull in my hand.
The truck’s engine roared. I jumped back as the vehicle jolted forward, spitting dust in my face. The driver’s side door was still open, swinging wildly, but the possessed woman had pulled her leg inside and was twisting at the steering wheel, her aura flaring wild and dark. I dropped the skull inside the bag, and ran after her.
Too slow, too late. The front bumper hit my knee as she accelerated past, but the boys deflected the impact. I tried to grab the door, but all I caught was air—and a glimpse of her determined, terrified expression.
I stopped running and watched the truck tear down the driveway in a choking cloud of dust. Bewildered, feeling stupid. Would that possessed woman have been able to pull off the same escape a year ago? Was I that sloppy?
Or am I getting too used to letting demons go?
I hated both possibilities. Might as well stick one foot in the grave. I was losing my edge.
That, or the edge had shifted sideways. Demonic possession didn’t mean the same thing anymore. It didn’t feel like the same threat I’d always thought it to be—not now, not after being exposed to far more immediate, and terrible, dangers.
I had lived my life believing that I was supposed to kill demons—all demons.
But the truth was worse.
I was the very thing that needed to be feared most. My body, a prison for five of the most dangerous demons ever to exist.
Reaper Kings. Devourers of worlds.
And I was their Queen.
CHAPTER 2
I was back on the porch, sipping that ginger ale, when Grant and Byron came home. I heard them coming before the dust started rising. My mother’s station wagon hadn’t been driven in close to fifteen years, and the engine had a complaint for every half mile—grumbling and coughing, spitting like it was some cranky old man. The wagon had been old before its retirement: one of those gas-guzzling tanks that whole families could camp inside on summer road trips into the mountains. Like a Disney movie, or something.
My mother and I had lived in that car for years. Comfortable. Lots of windows. Always an interesting view.
I felt strange every time I heard the engine. Too many memories. But that seemed to be what I needed right now, because I had Johnny Cash playing on the other side of the open window, his thunderous rumbling voce filling the warm air, and there was nothing like his music to inspire some deep contemplation of my mother and magic, demons, and murder.
That, and what we were going to have for supper. I was hungry.
I ambled down to meet the station wagon. Byron was behind the wheel, a nervous half smile on his face. He looked like a city kid with his floppy black hair, and the kind of pale skin you could only get from living in a place that never saw the sun. Like Seattle.
He was skinny, strong, all his fingernails painted black. An earring dangled, shaped like a feather. He’d had it for three days, bought from a local at a farmer’s market, and I was pretty sure it was his favorite thing.
Byron braked too hard, slamming him—and his passenger—against his seat belt. Dust flew. Creaks and pops filled the air, like settling bones. I bit back a smile, tapping the hot hood with my dark fingernails, and made my way around the bumper to the other side of the station wagon where Grant leaned out the window like he was thinking of crawling free.
“Save me,” he mouthed. I laughed out loud, and he reached out to hook his fingers inside the waist of my jeans, pulling me close until he could kiss the part of me that was closest to eye level—which just happened to be my hip. Heat spread through me, along with tenderness so big, I didn’t know why my heart wasn’t beating outside my body, maybe in the same spot where his mouth pressed against me.
“Welcome back, Mr. Cooperon,” I murmured, running my fingers through his thick brown hair. I felt, inside me, a tug—right below my heart—and inside my head saw a vision of golden thread burning bright.
Our very real bond, linking us, soul to soul. My strength, his. His strength, mine. Married, in more ways than one.
He made a small, contented sound. “Good to be alive, Mrs. Kiss.”
Byron, mostly out of sight on the other side of the massive station wagon, murmured, “I didn’t drive that bad.”
“Even the road tried to get out of your way,” Grant retorted, and opened the door with a groan. I grabbed his cane before it fell out, and held it for him as he swung his bad leg from the car. A hammer-wielding schizophrenic had crushed those bones some years back, but even with that old injury, my husband kept up with me better than anyone else in this world.
My husband.
Two words that made me warm and goofy. I had never imagined I would have this kind of relationship. It was not done. It was not safe. No woman in my family, to my knowledge, had ever tried to make a life with a man.
Of course, there was a lot I didn’t know about my ancestors. My bloodline was ten thousand years old. Assumptions were stupid. People fell in love. My grandmother had. So had my mother. But neither of them had stayed with her man, for better or worse.
For better or worse, I had.
Grant winced as he got out of the station wagon. Tall, broad, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that strained against his hard chest and shoulders. He radiated warmth and light, in ways that everyone felt, from young to old. He had a strong, masculine face, and eyes that could see right through a person. Or a demon.
Grant could see souls.
Souls, which were nothing but energy. Energy that could be manipulated, altered . . . and transformed.
With nothing but his voice.
My mother would have killed him, just for that. No hesitation. No second thoughts.
Byron slid from the driver’s seat and walked around to the station wagon’s rear hatch. I saw grocery bags inside and began to go and help him. Grant, though, touched my arm. The boys stirred beneath his hand, straining to be closer to him.
“Something happened,” he said, with a slight frown. “Your aura is . . . tense.”
I didn’t know what a tense aura looked like, but that possessed woman had been terrified—her demonic shadow fluttering like hummingbird wings. I could only imagine Grant was seeing something slightly more low-key around me.
“We had a visitor,” I told him quietly, while Byron wrestled with plastic bags. “She left a gift. It’s on the porch.”
Grant’s frown deepened. I kissed his cheek and went to grab some groceries.
Byron was still trying to load up on bags, like he was aiming to carry all twenty at the same time. I nudged him aside with my hip and a grin, and he smiled back, shyly.
“See any cute girls?” I asked him, watching from the corner of my eye as Grant limped to the porch.
The boy shook his head and touched the dangling earring. “I’m not sure I quite fit in, anyway.”
“You miss Seattle?” We still had a home there: a warehouse loft that sat above a homeless shelter that Grant operated out of his own deep pockets. It had been a month since we’d left it behind. There was too much death inside those walls. We needed time, not just to let the memories fade but to air out the stink of blood.
“Maybe.” Byron hesitated. “But this is nice. I like it away from the city. It’s . . . quiet.”
“Quiet feels safe,” I murmured, wondering if that was why my mother had made us live here after years on the road.
“Yeah.” He gave me a thoughtful gla
nce. “How safe are we?”
I hesitated a heartbeat too long. Byron blinked, and looked away. I nudged him again and ruffled his hair.
“Safe,” I said. “You’re safe with us.”
He didn’t say anything, wrestling instead with grocery bags—jaw tight, eyes dark and far away. I wondered, sometimes, if he remembered anything of all the lives he had lived—those thousands of years lingering somewhere in his cells, despite all attempts to keep him ignorant of his true, immortal nature.
Byron was no ordinary teenager. I was no ordinary woman. Grant was probably the most human of us all, but even he wasn’t from this world.
Our little family. Crazy and wonderful. And that was even without Zee and the boys.
Byron grabbed some bags, and I took the rest. Looked like vegetables and fruit, and baking materials. I spotted a lot of frozen dinners, too, along with motor oil, a dozen bottles of rubbing alcohol, and about that many family-sized bags of M&Ms. Good eats.
We lumbered to the house. Grant sat on the porch, staring at the crystal skull. I had set it out on a chair, nestled on a tattered red cushion. Johnny Cash still rumbled, this time about the apocalypse—which seemed incredibly appropriate.
Byron paused, staring at the skull. “Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” Grant muttered, and gave me a piercing look.
I shook my head and went into the house just long enough to dump the grocery bags and put away the frozen dinners. Byron opened the cabinets, unloading rice and cans. I patted his shoulder on my way out, and he only flinched a little. It wasn’t personal. He still had trouble, sometimes, being touched.
Outside, I found Grant sprawled in his chair, staring at the hill where my mother and grandfather were buried. He was humming beneath his breath, less a melody than a rumble, less music than power. His flute was in the house, but he’d been using it less, learning instead how to rely on his own voice to twist at the threads of energy around him.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked him.
“Who brought it?” he replied, instead of answering my question.
“A possessed woman. Terrified. She said that she was . . . ordered. In a dream.”
“That makes me feel so much better.”
I snorted and leaned against the rail. “It’s not shaped like a human skull.”
“No,” he said softly, “it’s certainly not.”
The cranium was wide, with three ridges across the brow and a similar protruding crest at the cheeks. The eye sockets were huge, and the carved jaw thick. The upper and lower rows of teeth were sharp as dagger points, jutting at odd, uneven angles that reminded me of a piranha’s mouth.
It should have been ridiculous. But it wasn’t.
It was disturbing as hell.
My first view of the skull, out in the driveway, had been too quick. I had not appreciated, then, just how unsettling it really was—but I’d been sitting with the thing for over an hour, and it was pretty much getting on my last nerve.
“I assume you’ve heard of crystal skulls,” Grant said.
“New Age bunk,” I replied. “Signs of alien life. Hosts of supernatural powers. Ancient computers. I spent a lot of late nights watching bad hotel television before I met you.”
His mouth twitched. “Pre-Columbian fakes. At least, that’s what one camp says, while others believe . . . well, everything you just said.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, rubbing my tattooed arms, soothing the boys. “But I bet demons didn’t deliver up those skulls in a bowling bag and red pickup truck.”
“No, you’re special,” he replied dryly. “This skull, sweetheart, isn’t from earth.”
CHAPTER 3
A lot of things weren’t from earth. Including humans.
Life had been a lot easier before that little discovery, which I tried not to think about all too often, given that it involved genocide and quantum highways, and aliens that could—and did—manipulate human DNA like it was nothing but silly putty. Those same aliens had imprisoned five demons on my ancestor’s body in an attempt to stop a war, and those same aliens had played God on this earth and on other worlds, creating monsters, becoming monsters, using humans as a living dolls in games meant to ease the burden and boredom of being immortal.
They were called the Aetar, or Avatars, and only one—that I knew of—still resided on earth. The rest had been gone for thousands of years, off to other worlds accessible through a network of quantum roads called the Labyrinth: a place outside time and space, a nexus where the infinite was possible across a universe that might only take a heartbeat to traverse.
I didn’t understand any of it . . . not as much as I needed to. A war was coming, and if it wasn’t fought, if I couldn’t find a way to stop the Aetar . . .
. . . this world would be lost. Humans would find their own bodies turned against them. If they were lucky.
Of course, there was another, even worse, possibility.
Six billion people could end up penned like cattle and eaten by the vast and starving demonic army currently locked away on the other side of a crumbling interdimen-sional wall.
A month ago, some of those demons had broken free. Humans had died. Next time, the break in the prison wall would likely be permanent.
Maybe I’d be able to control that army. Maybe not.
Up shit creek. No paddle.
But at least I had friends.
FIVE minutes until full sunset. Grant went inside to start dinner, and I took a walk, carrying the crystal skull inside the bowling bag. Neither of us wanted it in the house, and I had questions that couldn’t be asked around Byron, no matter how much weirdness the kid had been exposed to.
All that big sky hanging over the horizon was pale and golden and held the promise of shadows. I walked toward the hill where the oak tree stood over my mother’s grave. Even from here, I could see the green leaves shimmering with that same last light, nature turning to gold like some Midas touch of evening.
Birds sang, and insects hummed in the tall, dry grass. I inhaled deep, savoring the summer heat in my lungs, heat that I could not feel beneath my sleeping tattoos—and the warm wind blew, and was sweet, and so was the world.
I had almost reached my mother’s grave when the sun set below the horizon. I felt its last ray of light wink out in my soul . . .
. . . and the boys woke up.
Happened in a heartbeat. A hurricane of knives, skinning me alive. Every inch of my body, from nails to breasts, between my legs, and the soles of my feet—ripped away in one hard blast of pain that still, after all these years, almost dropped me to my knees.
I kept walking, though—staggering, bent—focused on reaching my mother’s grave. Tattoos peeled, shadows tearing off my skin and pouring out from beneath my clothing—gathering in a knotted dance of darkness and flicks of lightning. Hard. Fast. Whispers bent through the air, twisting into soft growls and laughter that dropped into hisses. I heard singing, brief and lilting.
Shadows coalesced. Claws gleamed. Razor-sharp spines of hair flexed against chiseled skulls. Muscles rippled beneath skin the color of soot and shadow, and in those shadows, smears of silver and throbbing veins, and jutting bones sharp as knives. Red eyes glinted.
I reached the grave and fell down on my knees. I felt the impact. I felt the sting of a pebble beneath my left palm. The wind was hot, even blistering, against my skin. Dry grass scratched my wrist. I felt it all, my skin tender, raw, and new. Totally human, without a single tattoo.
I was mortal. Until dawn.
“Maxine,” whispered Zee. “Sweet Maxine.”
I smiled for him, still trying to catch my breath. The little demon was vaguely humanoid, with spindly arms and legs, claws instead of fingers, and rakish, angular features: like the love child of a dragon and wolf, parts of his body caught in limbo between the two. He tended to crouch when resting, which meant he rarely stood higher than my knees.
Zee sat back, eyeing the bowling bag as Raw and Aaz bumped against my arms, trying to
crawl into my lap. The spikes jutting from their spines flexed with pleasure as I scratched behind their flattened ears, and I reached up to pat another set of sleek heads: Dek and Mal, who coiled their serpentine bodies over my shoulders. Purrs rumbled.
My protectors. My family. My friends.
Bound to my blood until I passed them on to the daughter I’d one day have—just as they had been passed on to me and every woman in my line, reaching back to the first of us—a human bound to demon flesh, bound forever, bound by heart and spirit. Bound, always, until the world tumbled down—and then, even, still together, perhaps.
I could not imagine life without them. I had never known life without the boys.
Zee had delivered me. If that wasn’t close, I didn’t know what was.
“How were your dreams?” I asked him, as Raw and Aaz tumbled off my lap and began prowling around my mother’s grave. Her headstone was a giant slab of rock that had been carved from the ground by little demon hands. My grandfather was buried alongside her, with a similar headstone. The dirt hadn’t yet settled. His body had only been dead for a month.
But he’d be back. Once he found someone else to inhabit.
Along the edges of those stone slabs were shadows—deep, lengthening—which Raw reached into with one long arm, as though sticking his hand into a bag. A magician’s bag, maybe, where doves and rabbits hid and where you might disappear if you weren’t careful.
Raw pulled nails and candy from the shadow—suspiciously like the ones Grant and Byron had brought home from the store. Aaz giggled, reached into the same shadow, and dragged out a six-pack of beer—which definitely was not from the house. He tipped back his head, pushed an entire can into his mouth, and closed his eyes with a sigh.
Zee edged closer to me, raking claws across his belly, drawing sparks.
“Bright,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the bowling bag. “Long and bright.”
I tipped out the crystal skull. I didn’t want to touch it again with my hands.
Zee tensed when he saw it. Dek and Mal stopped purring, their tails tightening around my throat. Raw and Aaz made choking sounds, and spat out the nails and chocolate bars they were stuffing by the fistful into their mouths.
The Mortal Bone Page 2