by Laken Cane
When Annex ops began arriving, she waved them back. “Stay outside the gates,” she told them. “For now. There’s no army inside Wormwood.”
Gunnar slipped up beside her. “Some creatures are not to be trusted.”
“The bones?” she asked.
“The gargoyles.”
She lifted an eyebrow then put her attention back on the freaky drama unfolding in front of her.
She barely noticed when Gunnar slipped his long fingers into the pocket of her jacket, latched onto the Baby Ruth she’d stashed there, and then melted away into the darkness of Wormwood.
Apparently the strangeness of the fight didn’t interest him as much as his craving for the candy bar.
“A hundred bucks on the bones,” Jack said.
Raze snorted. “I’ll take that bet. No pile of bones with a sword is taking out a fucking gargoyle.”
Strad sheathed his spear, then crossed his arms. “Has to be a reason Delaney is afraid of them.”
“He thought there’d be more,” Denim said.
“Yes,” Roma agreed. “He said army, not a couple of bony BFFs.”
“I almost feel sorry for that pathetic army,” Jack said.
“You want to fight with the bones?” Roma asked, her adoring stare on his face. She hefted her slingshot. “Let’s do it.”
Jack grinned. “Nope.”
The gargoyles, flying above the trio of sword-waving skeletons, sent down a rain of acid, and Rune narrowed her eyes even as she and the crew ran for the cover of the trees. The Annex had forbidden the gargoyles from using their deadly spit unless there were absolutely no friendlies around who could be hit by it.
The gargoyles obviously didn’t give a fuck what the Annex ordered.
But if their acid hit one of her people, Rune was going to rip off their heads. And when their fight with the puny enemy was over, they were going to answer to her. Jack and Roma had been hurt by the acid once, and she wasn’t letting it happen again.
On the positive side, once the gargoyle used up that particular weapon, it would take a while to generate more.
The bones silently batted away the acid with their swords; still, one of them was splashed by it.
“It eats flesh,” Denim said. “Can it eat bone?”
“Oh yeah,” Rune told him. “That shit can eat through anything.”
The skeleton who’d been slimed began to frantically slap at her leg, panicking until her leader turned toward her and shoved the tip of her bony finger into the growing hole.
Almost immediately, she yanked her hand away and turned back to the gargoyles, and her friend was healed. The hole closed, the acid halted, and the injured skeleton was healed.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack murmured.
“Yeah,” Rune said. “Magic fucking bones.”
Gavin swooped down, opened his mouth, and sent fire at the bones—but that fire was little more than a distraction. The skeletons ignored the flames, smacked their swords together, then pointed them at the gargoyles hanging in the sky.
A stream of pretty blue light blasted from the swords and streaked toward the gargoyles, and there wasn’t a doubt in Rune’s mind that if that light touched them, they were in trouble.
The gargoyles scattered, and all three of them pulled out their next—and worse, in some ways—deadly weapon. Their voices.
“Fuck,” Rune groaned, as her ears began to hurt. “Motherfuckers.”
The crew covered their ears. The gargoyles’ voices continued to affect them, but with a little less intensity.
But it didn’t touch the bones.
Rune was nearly certain that Jack was going to lose his hundred dollars.
The gargoyles finally shut their mouths and attempted the only thing left to them that could possibly defeat the three bones.
Brute strength.
They dive-bombed the skeletons, their massive, rocky fists raised to smash the skulls hidden beneath the bones’ thick hair.
Only problem was, they couldn’t get close enough to hit them.
Every time they tried, a spark, streak, or blast of blue magic sent them scurrying for cover. To see such powerful creatures toyed with by three small skeletons was almost laughable.
But Shiv Crew wasn’t laughing.
No wonder the gargoyles had been afraid. The three bones were giving them some real trouble. An army of them would have been unstoppable.
Gavin zoomed away, then reappeared with an armload of large rocks. He flung them as hard as he could, and they whooshed through the air like deadly missiles.
As the enemy dodged the rocks, Bellamy swooped down and prepared to smash a skull between her fists.
The skeleton she attacked ducked, turned, and sent her sword into Bellamy’s rock-hard, almost impenetrable belly, then jerked it upward and through her heart. The blade went in like butter, and Bellamy simply died. Immediately, and quietly.
The skeleton yanked her sword free, and Bellamy fell to the ground and didn’t move again. High above, Gavin roared his sorrow.
Gage never made a sound.
Rune wasn’t sure he even cared. After the horror he’d gone through, it was likely he was no longer capable of emotions. She wasn’t sure what motivated him, but it wasn’t love.
And she changed her mind about leaving the gargoyles to fight the bones alone. “Roma,” she said. “Jack.”
Without hesitation they strode a few yards closer to the bones, Roma already releasing her loaded slingshot. The bones didn’t notice—their attention was on the hated gargoyles.
Still, they were constantly moving, and would not be easy targets to hit. And Roma, not back to normal since her torture on Spikemoss Mountain, missed the bones and hit a tree instead.
The tree exploded, giving the bones a heads up that the gargoyles weren’t the only ones they needed to worry about, and as two of them continued to keep the gargoyles in their sights, one of them turned toward Jack and Roma.
“Uh oh,” Roma said.
Jack pulled the trigger of his shotgun, but he was too late—the skeleton threw up a shield that not even Skyll could penetrate.
“Take cover,” Rune screamed, because she knew what was coming.
She didn’t wait to see if her people obeyed her—they weren’t stupid, they would protect themselves. She streaked toward the bones.
She didn’t shoot out her claws. Claws weren’t going to hurt that enemy. But she was strong and she was fast, and she could absolutely break some fucking skulls.
After the skeleton tossed up a shield to deflect Jack’s shot, it—she—lifted her sword to send a streak of killing blue power toward him. But as her sword began to glow and her fingers began to glow, preparing to send out the magic, Rune barreled into her—and it was like a train hitting a skinny tree.
The bones might have been familiar with fighting the gargoyles, but they were not prepared for Rune. They were not prepared for Rune’s monster.
When Rune hit her, the shield not only remained—Rune saw it from the corner of her eye, a flash of shimmering blue power—but expanded. It surrounded them like an unbreakable bubble, and when Rune hit the skeleton, it was that bubble they slammed into.
And much like the demon’s wall, the bone’s magic wall hurt like a motherfucker when Rune hit it. But the skeleton was between Rune’s body and that wall, and she absorbed the brunt of the hit.
But it was her magic. It didn’t destroy her but it cracked her skull and shattered her bones. She knitted almost instantly. Just like Rune.
The injury to her skull seemed to rattle her, though, and she reached up to touch the hairline crack, the look in her eyes shocked and for one brief second, terrified.
Rune took advantage of that hesitation. She drew back her fist and smashed the bone’s skull against the wall of magic.
The skeleton’s skull shattered, and through the fragmented bone, Rune saw something glowing like a small red jewel.
That was what she needed. That was what would kill the bone
.
She shot out her claws, piercing the red, bejeweled brain, and a flood of horror rushed through her claws, up her arm, and into her very soul.
The bones were full of so much. So much sorrow, pain, laughter, love.
And even as the skeleton fell, her two friends grabbed her, sank into the ground, and left Rune to deal with the aftereffects of touching the magical horror that lived inside the bone’s skull.
Chapter Seven
They left nothing behind but a few scattered fragments of gleaming white bone and a residual taste of power from the dead skeleton.
The gargoyles gathered around Rune and the berserker, who’d reached her seconds after the skeletal enemy had gone into the ground.
“Rune?” he asked.
She sat up in his arms, slightly dazed. “I’m good. I think.”
“You killed one,” Gavin said, his eyes blank as he held his dead sister. “Death for death.”
“Bellamy…?”
He shook his head.
“Can’t you bring her back?”
“No. When a Corpse Soldier kills you, you stay dead. No matter who you are.”
He’d gathered the girl to his chest and her face was hidden, and she seemed somehow diminished, as though she’d shrunk in death.
“You should have told us,” Roma said, clenching her fists. “What else do we need to know?”
“You need to know they will kill you.” He threw them all a dark glance before he tightened his grip on Bellamy and turned to stride away. “They will kill you all.”
“One gargoyle down,” Jack said. “Two to go.”
“Just in River County,” Levi told him. “There are other gargoyles in the world. The bones won’t stop until they’ve killed them all.”
“I’m not convinced that’s what they want,” Rune said, climbing to her feet. “What I felt from that pile of bones wasn’t some kind of feud. She was…”
“What?” the assassin asked. “Grieving?”
She looked at him, surprised. “Yeah, maybe. She was desperate. In pain.” She thought about it for a minute. “Mostly desperate.”
“I’ll see what I can find out about the Corpse Army,” Will said. “There will be stories somewhere in the world. I’ll find them.”
She nodded. The gargoyles wouldn’t give them the entire story. No one expected them to.
And the bones couldn’t talk.
“They’ll be back,” Jack said.
“Oh yeah,” Rune replied. “At least two of them will be.”
“Are you really all right?” Roma asked, slightly devastated that she’d failed to hit the bones with her slingshot.
“I am.” Rune eyed her. “You didn’t miss by much, Roma.”
Roma glared at the ground. “I missed,” she said. “Doesn’t matter by how much.”
Jack squeezed her shoulder. “Give yourself a break, kid. It’ll come back.”
Roma seemed to forget her sadness as she gazed up at Jack, her face shining.
Rune sighed. Poor girl was so in love with him she couldn’t see straight, and Jack was only ever going to see her as a little sister. He’d gotten sweeter and more attentive to her since her capture. He loved her, but not the way she loved him.
And when she finally accepted that, Roma was going to be crushed.
But Rune had her own love life to worry about.
“What do we do?” Levi asked. “Go home, or camp out in Wormwood and wait for them to reappear?”
“And where the fuck are they?” Raze growled. “Where’s their world?”
“Somewhere like Skyll.” Roma rubbed at her arms. “I got a whiff of it. It was like Skyll, only…”
“Only,” Rune said, softly, when Roma hesitated, “something is wrong there.”
Roma nodded. “I think they’re dying out. Maybe that’s why only three of them came when the key discharged. They were the strongest ones.”
Rune put a hand to her chest as Roma’s words awakened a realization inside her. “And that’s what I felt in the girl. That was the grief. She was mourning a dying world.” She curled her hands into fists. “And I killed her.”
“You had no choice,” Strad said calmly. “And when they return, you’ll have no choice but to kill the rest of them.”
The moment was solemn and heavy, and Rune couldn’t help but wonder what the hell the gargoyles had gotten them into.
Whatever it was, Shiv Crew couldn’t allow it to fuck with River County. Even if the bones’ world was dying, that didn’t mean they could kill Rune’s.
“We’ll take off,” Rune said. “Get some sleep. If they return, the gargoyles will let us know.”
“What are you going to do?” Roma asked.
“Check on Kader, find Ellie, and figure out a way to get the key from Gavin Delaney,” Rune told her.
Raze put his hands on his hips. “You need sleep as well, Rune. Get some rest.”
“Sleep is overrated, and I’ll rest when I’m dead.” She grinned, riding high on the blood of her men. When she crashed, she could feed again—but there was no time for sleep. Not yet.
Her crew followed her back to the Annex. No one was in the mood for sleep. Roma called ahead and when they arrived, Bill had a table full of hot food waiting for them in one of the break rooms.
Rune left them to it. “I’m going to see my kid.”
She wasn’t taking Kader home, but she needed to see her. And after she visited Kader, she’d figure out Ellie.
Then the key.
One thing at a time.
She nodded to the guards outside Kader’s door. “Everything good?”
“All is quiet,” one of the guards said.
“Perfect.”
She opened the door and strode in, ready to kiss Kader’s fat baby cheeks.
“Hi, there,” Kader said, and held out her arms. “Get me, Mama.”
But Rune couldn’t move.
Kader was covered with blood, and Autumn lay on the floor beside her like a bloody, waxy mannequin, drained. Dead.
And for a second, Rune was staring back in time at her own small figure, her mother and father dead and bloody around her.
Would Kader forgive her monster more quickly than Rune had managed to forgive hers?
Kader smacked her lips and peered up at Rune. “You hungry?”
Rune pulled out her cell phone. “Bill,” she said when he answered. “I need help.”
“Be there in two minutes,” he said.
The night had been too long, and the bad shit just kept coming.
“Ellie,” she whispered.
“Ellie?” Kader asked, then forgot Rune when she saw a particularly thick drop of blood on the floor. She ran her finger through it. “Messy baby,” she said, sternly, then promptly popped the bloody finger into her mouth.
And Rune could only watch.
Bill was suddenly at her elbow. “Oh my.”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “My kid is a fucking psycho.”
Kader waved her arms. “Granddad,” she bellowed. “Well, whaddya know?”
“Ellis taught her that,” Bill said, his lips twitching despite the dead body on the floor and the murderous, bloody child beside it. “The granddad part.”
Rune crossed her arms over her chest. “Autumn’s dead.” One of her old, long-healed stake wounds began to throb. “And Ellie’s a vampire.”
Bill gave her a quizzical half-smile. “What? What do you mean?”
“Ellie had Nikolai turn him,” she said. “What I mean is, Ellie’s a fucking vampire.”
“Fuckin’ vampire,” Kader said. She climbed to her feet, then hurried to Rune. “Get me, Mama.”
“Ellis…” Bill blew out a hard breath and ran his hand over his face. “I can’t really say I’m surprised. You thought his biggest fear was being bitten, but his biggest fear was leaving you to face the world alone.”
Rune forced back tears. She missed him with a fierceness that physically hurt her.
“Mama,” Kader y
elled, slapping Rune’s leg. “Get me!”
Both Bill and Rune avoided looking too long at the dead nurse. “Her family,” Rune said, picking up the baby. “What will you tell them?”
“After he took over, Eugene had new employees sign agreements that if they died while doing their jobs, the Annex could refuse to disclose the circumstances of their deaths.”
“Bill.”
He sighed. “I’ll tell them she was attacked in the field by some rogue vampires. The Annex often sends nurses and assistants into the field.” He shrugged. “No one will be shocked or suspicious. It’s a risk to work here and they know that coming in.”
Rune hefted Kader. “What do I do about her?”
“You give her to me to train, as I’ve been saying all along. We’ll give her human blood in a sippy cup because we can’t have her biting people. We’ll train her in all things—especially self-control, self-defense, and the fine art of not killing her dinner when she eats someone.”
“Beau and Gannon—”
“Are not me.”
“The berserker—”
“Wants what’s best for Kader.”
Rune was silent for a few seconds. “We have to find an antidote for the addiction.”
“What we need,” he said, “is to cure the addictive bite.”
She shivered, imagining the freedom to bite anyone who offered his throat.
Kader relaxed in her mother’s arms and went immediately to sleep. She was a sticky, wild mess, and she’d killed a human woman, but Rune loved her with an incomparable fierceness. “We have to get her controlled before she can’t be stopped,” Rune said. “Does she have no empathy, Bill? Is she psychotic?”
He squeezed her arm. “Kader has empathy. Remember what she did when Autumn cried? She gets that from Z.”
“Yeah. And then she killed her. She gets that from me.”
“You’re not so bad, dear.”
She glared. “She just killed her nurse.”
“She was eating. Autumn was encouraging her to eat. The baby doesn’t comprehend death and she doesn’t know when to stop. Autumn was too lost in feeding her addiction to make her stop.”