The Mortal Bone

by Liu, Marjorie M.

  He flinched, giving me a stunned look—which relaxed, only a fraction, when he saw that I was teasing him.

  “Not funny,” he said.

  “I love that you reacted with horror.”

  Grant made a grumbling sound. “You’re going to be fine, Maxine. Wounds heal. I’m here. We have this.” He placed his hand over my heart. “And you’re too stubborn to give up.”

  “I notice you don’t include the boys in that statement.”

  “You saw what happened with Blood Mama. And Mary.”

  Again, I thought about the crystal skull. “And you saw what happened inside me.”

  “That . . . thing,” he murmured. “Yes, I saw. I felt its hunger.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Grant took my right hand, twining our fingers: metal, against his flesh. “But you need to be careful of the boys, Maxine. You need to listen to Zee when he tells you that they might change. Because I saw it, out in the desert. They fed on Blood Mama’s pain. They’ve never done that before.”

  I looked away and closed my eyes. “I have to believe in them.”

  “Well,” he said, softly. “If it helps, they believe in you. And so do I.”

  Mary appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, holding the crystal skull under her arm. I didn’t look too hard at that carved face, with its sharp teeth and huge eye sockets. In fact, I didn’t like looking at the skull, period. It gave me the same strange feeling as a mirror: I wasn’t certain what was looking back.

  “Know who this is,” she said, with a hint of pride. “Finally recognized the face.”

  Grant and I stared at her.

  “Er,” I said, wondering just how far in the past Mary had lived, before the Labyrinth had spat her out into modern-day earth. “Who is it?”

  Mary lifted her chin, and a cold smile touched her lips.

  “Old Wolf,” she said.

  CHAPTER 12

  I once asked my grandfather why those who knew him—knew him, really, for what he was—called him Old Wolf. He was, after all, immortal. And it seemed to me that when you lived as long as he had, the names that stuck probably had more than passing significance.

  “There are many different kinds of wolves,” he told me, sipping tea and nudging my foot with his. “On every world, in every variation. It has nothing to do with the actual creature, my dear. More like, the spirit of the thing. Its heart.”

  I leaned against all his books and crates, careful not to tip over the rare porcelain statues, and rocks, and some odd little bird bones gathered in a silver nest. “And what is the heart of the universal wolf?”

  My grandfather gave me a mysterious smile.

  “Look into your own heart for that answer,” he said, bending forward to pour more tea into my cup. “For we are a family of wolves.”

  APPARENTLY, walls really could talk, because five minutes later the phone started ringing. It was one of the women who ran the shelter, who’d heard that Grant was back and needed to see him regarding a month’s worth of urgent matters that she’d put aside just for his inevitable return.

  “They’re going to freak out when you announce you’re married,” I said. “When you tell them you’re married to the ‘violent tattooed woman,’ I think kittens may actually drop.”

  “That’s an evil smile you’ve got on your face,” Grant replied, “and we could use some cats.”

  I said I needed rest. He gave me a warning look, knowing perfectly well that I was lying—and then took Mary with him. She’d been out in the living room, fingering her belt and staring at the skull like she was thinking of getting naked again.

  I placed the skull on top of the grand piano and made it face the wall, so that I didn’t have to see its eyes.

  “Jack,” I muttered, thinking about my grandfather. “You got some explaining to do.”

  I wondered if he had felt the prison break. If so, then what about the other Aetar, far away from this world? They could feel when one of their own died. What about a spell—a work of reality-twisting—gone broken?

  Too many problems. Focus on one at a time.

  Like, why? Why this? Why break the bond between the boys and me?

  I went to my mother’s chest, tucked in the corner beside Grant’s worktable. I cracked the lock and began burrowing through everything that had been important to her—and me. Photos, papers, dolls. I didn’t touch her guns. I refused to use any weapon that required a bullet. Seeing my mother shot to death had pretty much ruined me on guns.

  I pulled out her journals and set them aside. Almost every woman in my bloodline kept some kind of diary—a lesson book to pass down to daughters, a way to keep hearts alive. My mother had written a lot. My grandmother, only one slim volume. I was probably going to be like her. I hadn’t written anything yet. Not enough to matter, anyway.

  I’d read my mother’s diaries backward and forward over the years, and never found one hint of anything regarding my father—or Labyrinths, wars, Aetar—everything I now knew she’d been perfectly aware existed. For some reason, she had deliberately left those parts out.

  There were, however, several pages that had been torn away. I’d always been curious as to why—but now I was burning up, wondering if my mother had written something she was afraid for me to see.

  I set aside the journals and pulled one more object from the trunk. A round stone disc, wrapped in purple silk. I hesitated before picking it up—and then, only handled it with my left hand, after putting on a pair of leather gloves. I always wore gloves during the day, in public, to hide my tattoos. That wasn’t a problem now.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, for no good reason other than I still hurt on the inside, and the boys weren’t here.

  Not here. Not even a hint of them. Gone, as if they had never existed.

  That, alone, made me feel insecure—physically and emotionally. It was stupid, too. I’d known the boys were imprisoned on my body. How had I ever thought that they wouldn’t leave me if they were free?

  It didn’t even matter that they had a good reason for being elsewhere—I shouldn’t have needed an explanation at all. It was their lives now. Not ours. Not ours, bound. Just theirs, on their own. Free.

  Free from me. Free from sunrise and sunset. Free to do whatever the hell they wanted.

  What I wanted was for them to be here—if only to reassure me that we were family, that we had always been family. I didn’t want that to be a lie. I didn’t want that to be a lie that I’d believed in because it was easier than the truth. Which was that five of my best friends in the world, five little hearts that were more than just friends, didn’t need me at all. And not only did they not need me, I was nothing but a reminder that for ten thousand years they had been imprisoned and controlled against their wills.

  I never questioned their loyalty or friendship. I took it for granted. I treated them as though they were free, but they never were.

  I blinked away tears, trying to refocus on the disc in my hand. Answers. I needed answers.

  The pale stone disc was the size of my palm, engraved with a series of circular lines—a labyrinth. Similar symbols could be found everywhere in the world, from prehistoric wall paintings to the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France. Cross-cultural meanings that ranged from sacred paths to sacred ancestors to symbolic forms of pilgrimage. Not a coincidence. Maybe no one knew about the real Labyrinth, but the memory was there, in blood, in the unconscious, flowing through humanity.

  The disc was called a seed ring and was filled with one year of my mother’s memories.

  I had only been able to access a few of those memories because odd things tended to happen when handling the seed ring. The armor on my right hand, made of a similar substance, sometimes reacted in extreme ways to its presence—up to, and including, time travel. Which sometimes happened anyway. The armor occasionally had a mind of its own.

  I hesitated and placed my left hand on top of the seed ring.

  Nothing happened. Frowning, hold
ing my breath, I traced the labyrinth lines engraved in the stone and closed my eyes, concentrating on my memory of the silver rose, the message on the stem, as well as the details of a previous seed-ring vision: my mother, in a soft bed, speaking to a man . . .

  I had to see that man, and remember . . .

  The armor tingled. So did my entire left arm, starting from my fingertips. Pins and needles, pricking me. I felt dizzy, muddled, as though my thoughts were draining down a dark hole. For a moment, I couldn’t remember who I was. Just a shell housing a hammering heart and a whole lot of nothing.

  A whole lot of nothing suddenly filled with stars.

  I was dimly aware of my body still seated on the apartment floor, but my mind was so very far away that flesh was nothing but an afterthought. I stared into a darkness seeded with small distant fires, burning in the vastness of time, endless space. Hundreds of billions of stars in just one galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies flung across the universe, with more being born, more shedding light, more and more life somewhere, elsewhere, forever.

  We are small, said a gentle male voice. We are small, but precious.

  We are nothing, I said. All this, all these wars, all this grief and pain . . . means nothing.

  It means something, he whispered. It means everything. We are all the light, and we are all the thunder, and we are all part of the old song that sprang from one note, one moment, one possibility.

  All I felt was despair. And what was that possibility?

  Hope, he said, softly, and the stars began streaming toward me—or maybe it was me, streaming toward them. The same hope I felt when I loved your mother.

  The stars winked out, and suddenly I was back in the apartment, full in my flesh, feeling heavy and turgid, and trapped on the ground. I could still sense forward movement, and when I closed my eyes for just a moment, I was moving, flying, racing across space toward that field of light. Listening to that voice.

  My heart ached.

  I pushed the seed ring away. Dizziness eased, but I had to slump down, breathing hard, trying not to vomit. Pain trickled up the back of my skull, sinking so deep into my brain I wanted to stick my entire head in ice.

  I looked at the back of the crystal skull, which seemed like nothing more than a glorified paperweight.

  I needed to talk with that demon in the red truck.

  IT was still hot in Texas. Hotter than usual. I felt the sun baking through me when I stepped from the void onto a dusty street where the lawns were brown and the fences had once been white picket—and now were just gray, toothy, and broken. Dogs barked, but otherwise, it was a workday, and the neighborhood was quiet.

  I saw the red pickup truck parked several houses away.

  I stood for a moment, staring. I could see a dent in the front bumper from where the truck had hit my knee. But that had been before, and the boys were no longer bonded to me. I was stupid to be here on my own. Bullets would kill. So would knives, fists, a good slam of my head against the corner of a table. I’d seen every way a person could die, but I’d never thought much about any of those things happening to me. Not for another twenty years, or so.

  I had the armor, though. I had resolve. I couldn’t hide forever.

  The demon’s home was a white ranch with broken plastic siding and a gutter that dangled at a forty-five-degree angle. An entire army of plastic gnomes littered the lawn, all of them turned so that their backs were to the street—and their painted eyes glued to the front door. I found that immensely creepy, and I’d seen some sick shit in my life.

  I rang the doorbell, the back of my neck prickling from all those staring gnomes. When no one answered, and I didn’t hear movement on the other side, I walked around the house.

  Thick curtains covered the windows. I didn’t see any security-alarm stickers. No gnomes in the backyard, but there were lawn chairs that had seen better days and a birdbath with no water and several dead birds lying beside it.

  I glanced around. No neighbors gawking at me. No one at all.

  I walked to the back door and knocked again. Listened.

  More silence. I took that as an invitation and pulled some picklocks from my wallet. If this had been night, one of the boys would have slipped through the shadows to open the door from the inside. I’d relied on them too much, though. It took me a minute to get back into my groove.

  Before I’d met Grant, I’d lived on the road, traveling from city to city—investigating crimes, stalking demonically possessed humans. Sometimes I couldn’t wait for night. I just had to get in—to homes, offices, cars. My mother had taught me all the tricks, then she’d taken me to professional criminals for extra training. All those guys had loved her. She put the “Bad” in “Big Bad Momma.”

  God, I missed her.

  God, I was furious at her.

  The lock turned. I opened the door, slowly. First thing I saw was a kitchen. It was messy, but not dirty. Newspapers on the table, a dish that hadn’t been cleared. I smelled roast chicken.

  I shut the door behind me and kept moving, listening hard for creaks, the rub of cloth, or breathing. All I heard was me. I was beginning to think I was alone until I reached the living room.

  The possessed woman who had brought me the crystal skull slumped on the couch. I was pretty sure it was her, anyway. Same clothing, same size.

  Most of her head had been blown off. Blood and brain matter covered the white wall behind her. I had to turn away, sickened. Reminded me too much of my mother.

  When I could breathe again, and I didn’t think I would vomit—much—I turned back, tentatively, to examine the area around the dead woman. I didn’t see much. A handgun beside her, a box of bullets. A couple well-thumbed issues of National Geographic on the coffee table, along with a box of medication. She looked as though she’d spent a lot of time on that couch. There were blankets, a pillow.

  I didn’t think she’d been dead long. The air didn’t smell that bad.

  Suicide, I thought. The television was on, but the sound had been turned down. I saw images of toppled buildings, broken roads—and a rolling headline bracketed in bright red. There had been a massive earthquake in Memphis, Tennessee. Over seven on the Richter scale.

  Memphis was at one end of the New Madrid fault. I’d read an article about it only recently. Seismologists had been saying the region was overdue for an earthquake, but the timing bothered me.

  Nothing to do with you or the boys, I told myself. Just nature.

  But it would be a perfect feeding ground for parasites. Blood Mama herself was probably there, soaking in the power of that sharp, immediate suffering.

  I watched the television a moment longer, concerned for the people in Memphis, then looked back at the dead woman. What a waste.

  I walked through the rest of the house—careful, still listening. Did a demon parasite take sustenance from killing its own host? I’d never seen a suicide during a possession. Self-inflicted injuries typically happened afterward, when former hosts woke without memories, only to discover they’d murdered people, or molested children, or committed any number of horrible, violent crimes.

  The woman’s bedroom was clean, plain, and seemed relatively unused. Some clothes had been laid out on the bed, along with a suitcase. No pictures, nothing that was personal.

  I found a second bedroom, but that one was totally unused. No sheets on the bed. No clothes in the closet. I didn’t know why, but I got the same prickly feeling standing there that I had on the lawn, being stared at by a bunch of plastic gnomes.

  I walked through the rest of the house—passed the dead woman—and ended up again in the kitchen. I opened the basement door but hesitated on the threshold, staring into that dark cement hole.

  I was scared of the dark. I’d always been, but I’d had the boys. A couple years back, I’d found myself thrown into a real hole—a hole on the edge of the Labyrinth—where there was no light, where I’d lived blind. Buried alive. Only the boys had saved me. Only the boys had kept me sane,
and even then, it’d been iffy. I still had nightmares.

  The basement reminded me of that place.

  I found a switch and flipped it. Light flooded the stairs. I breathed a little easier and forced myself to take that first step—and then another. The wooden stairs creaked. I smelled wet concrete. Something else, too . . . that was floral.

  The light covered the stairs but not the rest of the basement. I ran my fingers along the wall but found no other switch. Even though my vision was typically good in the dark, I still had trouble seeing. It made me nervous, and I hated that. I hated that I didn’t feel strong enough on my own, without the boys. I’d faced terrible things in my life and done so with my head held high.

  But one simple basement had my heart pounding.

  Any courage I’d shown before . . . had it ever been real? Or just false bravado because I knew I couldn’t get hurt?

  I stripped off my right glove and flexed my hand. The armor began glowing. Softly, at first, then brighter. The basement revealed itself—an old metal bed frame, a couple bikes, a weight-lifting apparatus covered in cobwebs.

  I also saw a cage.

  Inside the cage, a naked woman.

  She was curled on her side because the cage wasn’t big enough for anything else. Nothing left of her but skin and bones, though the dark hair that draped over her face looked surprisingly clean. I didn’t smell feces or urine. In fact, besides mold and rust, the only other scent I could pick up was soap. I saw a hose nearby, attached to a faucet. A drain in the center of the floor.

  “Hunter Kiss,” whispered the woman, startling me. I’d thought she was dead. In fact, when I looked at her again, she still hadn’t moved. I did, however, see a glimmer of her dark aura, barely noticeable in the shadows.

  “Hunter,” she murmured again. “I thought you’d come here, eventually.”

  I crouched, checking out the padlock on the cage door. “Are you the same parasite that used to wear the skin upstairs?”

  “Yes,” she breathed. “Thought it would be better for Delanne to die, rather than wake up and see her sister like this. They were close, before I took over.”