Blood Metal Bone: An epic new fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo

by Lindsay Cummings

  Karr didn’t remember this. Perhaps his unconscious mind had held onto the truth, while he’d been sleeping in that bed. He’d been sick when he was younger, had a heart defect that had always kept him from playing with the other kids when they landed on planetary docks. But he’d grown up. He’d grown stronger, taken medicine all his life until he was older… and then he’d grown out of needing that, too.

  “This is where it changes, my heart,” Eona said. “This is where the truth is told.”

  Again, the image morphed until it became a memory that belonged to Soahm. The same thing Karr had seen in his dreams, watching the Soreian prince get taken just beyond the mouth of the cave. There was Sonara, younger and terrified as she ran, leaving Soahm behind.

  The memory flickered back to the Starfall again.

  It showed Karr on a table, unconscious as a man came aboard. A man that was tall, with dark eyes and a silver suit. Much younger than he looked now, but…

  “Friedrich Geisinger,” Karr said now.

  At the same time his father, in the memory, stood to greet the man. “Geisinger. You’ve agreed to help us.”

  Geisinger nodded, looking down at Karr’s tiny, unconscious body. Wires connected to his chest, and a tube inside of his throat, breathing for him. He didn’t remember any of it. Unless… perhaps he did.

  The flashes of pain, a bright room that came frequently in his dreams.

  A man, standing over him with only his eyes showing, a mask over the rest of his face.

  “It will not be easy, but the boy will live, assuming his body accepts the donor heart,” the memory-Geisinger said. “The Dohrsaran heart is genetically superior to the human’s, having evolved to be able to sustain life for centuries in their poisonous atmosphere. It will be far better… capable of giving him new strength. A long and prosperous life. And the terms of our deal?”

  Karr’s father wrapped his arm around Karr’s mother. She sat, shaking at Karr’s bedside as she held his tiny pale hand. She did not look away as she wiped her tears and whispered, “Do it.”

  Karr’s father signed a contract. “A lifetime of servitude,” Geisinger said, “in exchange for payment. It won’t seem so bad, when your boy lives. Grows old. Has children of his own, and never knows the sacrifice you made in order to save him.”

  “And the donor?” Karr’s father asked.

  “The abductee, from the dwarf planet?” Geisinger shrugged. “He won’t feel a thing.”

  A new memory.

  A shift.

  Karr saw through Soahm’s memories again, as he lay on a table, a shot injected into his arm. A poison, leaching into his system.

  It did hurt, dying. It burned like a raging fire.

  Soahm screamed from the inside, only the sound never made it out, for his heart stopped beating. His breath stilled on his lips.

  His heart was removed, healthy and alien—and found to be much stronger than any Earthen donor’s could dream of being. Geisinger placed the heart inside of Karr’s open chest and sewed him back together, the scar an ugly reminder of what his parents had done… but one that would fade with time, with emerging science.

  As Soahm’s lifeless body was removed, Geisinger set aside an alien amulet: a black rock inside of a ring of gold, that had been around his neck.

  Soahm’s memory shifted into Karr’s again, months later.

  “This was given to us by a very dear friend,” Karr’s mom whispered, as she held him in her lap, and they stared out the viewport at a beautiful blue moon, a delicate orb that hung aloft in the black sky. This memory, Karr did remember. “You should wear it. Keep it safe, always above your heart, and be grateful that you live.”

  She placed a necklace over Karr’s head, letting it fall just above where a scar sat on his skin. Soahm’s necklace. The amulet that had been with him when he was abducted.

  “Why are you crying, Mommy?” the memory-Karr asked.

  “Nothing to burden yourself with, sweet boy.” She wiped her tears away, and smiled down at him, beautiful as a star. “I love you,” she said. “I would give anything for you. Even my goodness. Even my soul.”

  The next memory was Karr’s, one of the most recent, as he hid inside the Starfall and the raiders came aboard. He saw his parents’ bodies, withering from existence. He’d been clouded by fear then, but he saw it all clearer now. He heard their words as they searched the ship.

  “That’s what happens when you try to run from Geisinger. When you don’t honor his deals,” the first raider said, staring down at Karr’s father’s body. “No one can ever escape him.”

  “Kids, man,” the other raider said. “Geisinger didn’t say they had kids.”

  That one was Jeb. He knelt down, his golden, shark-toothed smile widening as he found Karr hiding beneath the ship’s dash. Karr had passed out, then. Fainted out of pure fear.

  But some part of his brain must have held onto the memory. Or perhaps it was the new heart he hadn’t known was beating inside of his chest… holding half of Eona’s soul, the soul that had been entrusted to Soahm. And Karr had stolen it in the end.

  The next scene showed Cade returning to the ship, back from his errands on the docks, to discover his parents, dead. His little brother, captured.

  “You work for Geisinger, don’t you?” Cade asked Jeb.

  Jeb’s nose was broken and bleeding, his eyes bloodshot as he held a gun to Cade’s head. A second gun sat discarded, just out of Cade’s reach. As if when Cade had arrived, he’d shot the other man, but fell to Jeb’s strength in the end.

  “You’ve been ordered to kill us, too?” Cade asked.

  Jeb nodded, pressing the gun closer to Cade’s temple. But it trembled.

  And Cade looked up at him, a perfect mask of sadness spread across his young face. “We will pay our parents’ debt. We will do it. Say you killed us. But let us live. We’ll do whatever you ask. We’ll serve you forever… just let us live.”

  The memories stilled.

  The sea of darkness returned.

  Eona turned away from the edge, facing Karr and Sonara with a sad smile.

  “All this time,” Sonara said. “All this time I spent searching for him… he was already gone.” There were tears pouring down her face. Her body shook with rage.

  Karr wanted to reach over. To grab her hand with his, but then he thought better of it. For what was he to her, but the boy his parents had killed her brother to save?

  A monster.

  A child of monsters.

  That was what he was.

  “Not gone,” Eona said. “Not entirely. The portion of my soul that Soahm carried in his heart… it remains in Karr now. His memories are also held within.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it,” Sonara growled. “Soahm should have lived.”

  “My soul held on to his heart, because it chose him a worthy replacement,” Eona explained.

  Somehow the word replacement felt like a knife driven into Karr’s chest.

  “And now he lives again, through Karr. Your magic killed Karr so that he would come to our side. So that Soahm’s portion of my soul would not be wasted. That it would be brought back home, where it belongs. And here he is, a chosen Shadowblood, who has half the power I once had. Together, you can stop the darkness.”

  “I will kill him,” Sonara said suddenly. “I will kill Cade, and Geisinger, and whoever else had a hand in this.”

  She would not look at Karr.

  And what would he do, if she did?

  Karr swallowed his own tears away, the horrors that he’d seen. The reality that all of his life—his lives—had been some tangled, covered-up lie.

  “Our time runs short,” Eona said now. “For soon the darkness will break through the walls, into this sacred place. You must do what you can to protect the heart. To save Dohrsar from the soul that seeks it.”

  “Cade?” Karr asked.

  “No.” Eona shook her head. “Not entirely. Cade is only a pawn. There comes a deeper threat. Because there wa
s another soul that survived, one that would not allow itself to be laid to rest. The greed, the desire to reach this place… it allowed my brother Eder’s spirit to keep on living, so that someday he could make it back to the heart again.”

  She pointed upwards, into the sky. It had lightened, to show them an opening as the boat began to rise back towards the cave where the heart sat; where Azariah and Jaxon peered down, frozen like time itself had stopped. “My strength fades. My message is completed, my souls returned to this space. You will take over now. Protect the heart.”

  “How?” Karr asked.

  “I’m afraid I have given you too much already. The afterlife will not be kind to me, the goddesses furious, for what I have already done. I have waited a long time to finally lay my spirit to rest. If I say much more, I fear that I will end up like my brother. That when Eder dies, too… we will spend eternity together, fighting a war that neither of us can win.”

  “Tell us how to defeat the darkness,” Karr said. “Please.”

  For when Cade arrived, there would be an army.

  His power was not enough. A few Shadowbloods against an army… they would not win.

  Eona was fading from view. The boat disappeared, and suddenly Karr and Sonara were back in the cave, kneeling over the heart as it turned solid again. But before Eona disappeared, he heard her whisper her final words. “Find the missing pieces of the planet’s heart. You have all you need to awaken her. To put her back together again.”

  The heart solidified, and Karr felt thrown back into his body, as if perhaps all that had just transpired was only inside of his mind.

  He pulled his hands away as time snapped back into motion again. Behind him, Jaxon’s voice returned, his words picking up right where they’d left off. “Don’t touch it!”

  Markam’s body was still unconscious beside Azariah.

  It was as if nothing had transpired at all, while they were inside.

  “His heart,” Sonara whispered.

  She pulled her hands away and turned to face Karr. She reached up slowly to grip the necklace around her throat that had once belonged to Soahm. “You carry his heart,” she said. “It’s why you carry his aura on your blood.”

  “Sonara,” he said gently. “I’m—”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said, turning her back to him. She seemed numb; as if all the rage and grief within her had been pushed deep down. “It won’t bring Soahm back.”

  The space was still. Only the beating of the planet’s heart, the sighing breath, the scent of death from the piles of bones, remaining from the battles Eona had waged against Eder.

  The silence broke when the far wall of the cave temple shook once.

  Twice.

  Then it exploded, a rain of mountain rocks caving in, as a hole finally broke through. The silver tip of the massive drill stopped spinning as it was turned off from the outside, the screech of it dying out as it finally came to a stop.

  Karr coughed dust from his lungs, waving his hand before his eyes as a small cluster of shadowed figures emerged first through the rubble.

  Cade, and Rohtt shortly behind him. Following them, the Dohrsaran army stood waiting to widen the entrance, the mites still attached to their necks. Forced to do his bidding, or there would be pain; and then, death.

  But there was a third figure who emerged and shook off the dust, then rose to standing at Cade’s left, her hand on his wrist as he guided her over the rubble and into the clearing.

  She dropped to her knees as she beheld the heart. Karr couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to, for the wolf skull gave her away.

  It was Thali.

  Chapter 39

  Cade

  Cade Kingston loved trouble, had lived it and breathed it since the day he’d come back from his errands on the starship docks, and found Jeb Montforth kneeling over his parents’ corpses.

  Jeb held an unconscious Karr in his arms, a bloody knife in his fist.

  But Cade had his father’s pistol, so he’d first shot the man with Jeb, and then he’d forced Jeb into a sparring match.

  In the end, Jeb won the match, besting Cade because he was twice his age and twice his size. But looking back, Cade knew that he’d bound himself to trouble that day, that it would someday come to find him again.

  And find him, it had.

  “You work for Geisinger,” Cade had said, when Jeb pressed him to his knees and held his father’s gun to his head. “You’re here to finish us all off, because my parents tried to run from him. They didn’t honor the deal they’d made. The payment.”

  Jeb’s hand was trembling on the gun.

  Like he was bold enough to use a blade on a fully grown man, but too much of a coward to use a bullet on a kid.

  “We’ll pay their (debt,” Cade said. “My brother and I. We’ll work it off. We’ll spend the rest of our lives doing his bidding. We’ll go anywhere, steal anything. I’ve seen my parents work, I know how to run this ship.”

  Jeb called Geisinger up, and gave him the counteroffer.

  And just like that, the Kingston brothers sealed a lifetime of indenture to Friedrich Geisinger. But the man didn’t want to deal with them. Space trash, he’d said, so Jeb himself became a bastard father of two. Geisinger would call upon them if he ever had need.

  Karr couldn’t know about the deal.

  So Cade had spun a lie.

  A lifetime of lies for a lifetime of trouble.

  He wasn’t entirely surprised, when, ten years later, Friedrich Geisinger himself forced him into the Dohrsaran deal.

  Cade had done it. Not because he’d wanted to—the weight of the sins he’d have to carry, doing the man’s bidding… what he’d have to do to the people there…

  It was hideous work.

  Unforgiveable.

  But Cade had already committed a lifetime of unforgiveable sins.

  So he’d taken the deal, in part because Geisinger swore it would be the final job to pay off his parents’ debt. But also because Cade wondered, if perhaps, by giving Karr this gift—true freedom—he’d be able to save his little brother from burning in some locked cell in hell for his sins.

  Sins by association.

  Sins Karr didn’t even know he’d had a part in committing.

  “How can I trust that you won’t run, like your parents once did?” Geisinger had asked. “How can I trust that the sins of the father won’t pass down to the son, and repeat themselves over again?”

  Cade had bet his life on this job. Because he’d needed it. God, he’d needed it, to set Karr free.

  It was a stupid bet. Downright foolish, but not on Cade’s part. It was foolish on Geisinger, because Cade never intended to leave this job alive. Fate was too fickle, a guiding force that he had decided, years ago, would not let him live to grow old.

  He’d never forget the pain of that night, after he’d signed on the dotted line for this job.

  When Rohtt came to his hospital room and wheeled him into surgery.

  When the pretty nurse with a robotic eye had ripped Cade’s chest open… and a queen mite was attached to his very heart. As long as the queen mite lived, the other mites lived, too. A complete failsafe, so that Cade would have no other option but to complete the job.

  Do what Geisinger asked, return the Antheon, and the mite would be removed.

  But if he failed…

  All Geisigner had to do was hit stop on the queen mite that held Cade’s life in balance.

  Then he’d join his parents in whatever came after death.

  The queen mite ached. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, and the more he wriggled and tried to scratch at the queen mite, at the flesh that had healed and cracked open again, despite the anti-rejection medication Rohtt pumped him with each night…

  The queen mite was slowly sucking the life from him. Twice, he feared Karr had almost noticed, from the plans in his quarters, and the bleeding on his chest, when they’d landed on Dohrsar. But Karr had messed this mission up in other ways.


  This was Cade’s last stand.

  His last chance.

  And he would do whatever it took to finish the job.

  The rubble cleared, and Cade climbed over it, past the point of the drill as he beheld the Antheon within. The pulsing black rock was real, nestled in the middle of a golden amphitheater, a ring of firelight casting a glow on the entire cave.

  He’d done it.

  Cade nearly wept as he walked forward, his eyes finding the Antheon. All the pain and the planning, all the lies and the sins he’d commited… it would all be worth it, when he commanded his prisoner army to rip it right from the Dohrsaran ground.

  Cade reached the edge of the amphitheater, a grin blooming on his face.

  But it fell, the moment he got a full view of the bottom.

  “Karr.”

  Damn him and his resourcefulness.

  For there his little brother stood, alive and well and still without his S2 helmet. Cade almost didn’t believe it, didn’t want to trust that his eyes weren’t betraying him. But sure enough, Karr stood before the Antheon, his hair pushed back from his face as the rock itself seemed to sigh. To take a breath in and out, pull and release.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Cade,” Karr said.

  His voice echoed up the golden steps like a gunshot.

  Cade swallowed, and held out his arms, considering how he’d perform this very last dance. How he’d get Karr to come back to his side, before all was lost. “Come here, little brother. It’s not too late to return to your own people. Your family, Karr. It’s all been a misunderstanding. We can keep you safe. That’s all we want. Whatever effect this poisonous atmosphere has had on you… let’s remedy it together. Come back to my side. We’ll take the Antheon and soar away from here forever.”

  His voice carried out above the strange pulsing of the Antheon. The sighing of some sort of sickly smelling wind. Just as Thali had told him, it was alive. Like a creature in its own right.

  “You can’t have the heart,” Karr said. “This job, and what you’ve done to these people to complete it… it’s not worth it, Cade. Stop now, before I stop you myself.”