The Mortal Bone (24 page)

I opened my eyes.

“Maxine,” Grant said, but I barely heard him. I was lost in that vision, in those emotions—the pain, and hunger for pain, forming the root of so much agonized rage.

“ ‘Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate,’” I muttered.

“Yoda, from
Star Wars
?”

“ ‘Hate leads to suffering.’” I met his gaze. “Yoda knows his shit, man.”

Grant’s mouth crooked in a gentle smile.

WE took the crystal skull with us.

I didn’t know if there was much point to having it anymore, given that so many others had been destroyed—but there was always
maybe
. I lived for the possibility of
maybe
.

It was night in the desert. I looked up at the stars, and for a moment was lost, light-headed, thinking about hope and light, and thunder. My left hand tingled. So did my right.

We stood on the edge of the oasis. In front of us, deep amongst the palms, a small fire burned. I heard music playing. Beethoven. I carried a small backpack over my shoulder, filled with clothes, cash, and weapons.

“You know,” Grant said, as we walked across the sand, “I once knew a man who named his daughter Sunday.”

“No days of the week.”

“Hello, Friday. Friday Kiss. Friday Cooperon. My girl Friday.”

I kicked sand at him.

“Bessie,” he said. “Bertha.”

I shook my head and found myself touching my stomach—an unconscious gesture that took my breath away when I realized what I was doing. I glanced at Grant. He was looking at my hand. His gaze met mine, and even in the darkness of the desert night, I saw and felt his warmth.

We both heard a familiar chirping sound.

Dek poked his head from the sand at my feet.

A curious unraveling sensation filled me, almost as if my heart were a string coming untangled.

“You,” I said, unsure whether to feel good or awful about seeing him. Had the boys felt me trying to go to them? Did they know what Blood Mama had told us or that Grant had altered her spirit?

“I tried to go to you,” I said, unable to keep the reproach from my voice. “You kept me away.”

I crouched, staring Dek in the eyes. “I don’t think it was to keep me safe. I think you were hiding something from me.”

The look in his eyes was haunting, though not nearly as poignant as his heart. I found fury and hunger in his pulse—but buried deep, overcome by a shuddering relief to see me. The kind of relief that came after a bad night, a bad time, when all anyone wanted was to be held, no questions asked.

So I held him—and felt held. More relieved than I wanted to admit to have him with me though it also served to highlight just how wrong, how dangerous, how vulnerable it made us all, in body and soul.

Mal appeared nearby. Grant picked him up and stared into his glinting red eyes. Both of them so intense, refusing to back down.

I touched his arm. “A lecture won’t do any good.”

“He deserves more than a lecture,” muttered Grant, and dropped Mal. “Lying to you isn’t protection.”

Mal hissed at him. Grant kicked sand over his scales.

“That’s my daughter,” he snapped at the demon, and hearing him say those words made my gut clench with a hard, primal ache. “My wife.”

“Mal,” I said, crouching with my hand extended. He bared his teeth one more time at Grant, then slithered to me, making disgruntled sounds. I felt anger roll into my heart, anger and shame, and that ever-present regret. Mal licked my hand, and I put him on my shoulder with Dek, who scolded him and bit his neck, gently.

I touched both their heads. “Where have you been?”

Dek buried his head in my neck. Mal remained silent.

I persisted. “You were hunting. I know it. Human or demon?”

Human or demon.
As if one or the other would make a difference. As if one would be better than the other when both were bad.

Dek began to hum, but what I noticed first was that his breath smelled like blood. After that, I couldn’t gather my thoughts enough to figure out what song he was singing. It didn’t matter. My boys had been killing.

They’ve always been killers,
I told myself.
You knew that. Only now they’re not killing for you.

I was such a hypocrite. Double standards, a mile long. But I didn’t care about that. I wanted to know who had died, and why.

“There will be war,”
Blood Mama had said.

Grant reached for my hand, and we kept walking.

We found the Messenger at the fire’s edge, which burned a safe distance from her tent.

No sign of her bonded Mahati warrior, though I thought he must be close. She sat in a meditative pose, legs crossed beneath her, spine straight as an arrow, and her palms resting on her knees. Her pale skin was golden in the firelight, casting deep shadows on her angular face. She watched us approach with no reaction save a slight frown.

“You are both a tangle of knots,” she said. “Death would be easier than disentanglement.”

Grant rubbed his face. “Do you have something to eat?”

Her brow lifted, and she winked out of sight. The cool night air filled in the space she had been occupying and swirled around me. My clothes were still damp from the rain. I might have felt a chill if it hadn’t been for Dek and Mal coiled heavy on my shoulders.

Grant settled down in the sand, wincing as he straightened out his bad leg. I sat beside him, then couldn’t keep upright, and I curled in front of the fire, staring at the flames. He placed a strong, warm hand on my ankle, while Dek and Mal—my little pillows—began purring.

“I think you all need to rest,” he said.

“Just for a minute,” I murmured, unable to keep my eyes open, my entire body aching and heavy with exhaustion. Just resting there, with Dek and Mal—and Grant—made taking one little nap sweeter than I could even say.

Inside my heart, my little demons went soft, quiet.

I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I really slept because I kept jerking awake for brief, uncomfortable moments—just long enough to assure me that we were still alive, that no one was attacking us, and that Grant was resting on his side beside me, staring thoughtfully into the fire. Dek and Mal were curled beneath my head.

Everything fine. Just fine. And then I would remember, too, that I was pregnant—and close my eyes thinking about names.

This went on, until finally,
finally
, I fell into a deeper sleep, one that held me down and kept me warm, safe.

I drifted, and smelled roses.

Bells chimed. Water murmured. I inhaled a breeze that made my heart ache with its sweetness, like dawn, or spring: a scent made for perfect days. I lay still, lost in that quiet. I floated. I opened my eyes.

I was no longer in the desert. I saw a stone arch. A vast balcony on my right, filled with silver moonlight. Roses covered the rail. Huge blooms. Soft petals. Crimson, not silver. Red as blood.

But it was all fake. In the shadows around us hung the night sky, as though the walls, the bed, everything, was nothing but a ragged illusion, a cobbled patchwork, between which were stars on the ceiling—stars in the crevices between the archway and the bed—stars in the folds of my covers.

A man sat in a chair beside the bed. I could not see much of him. Lost face, lost body, lost to those starlit shadows, a deep field of them, with the barest hint of spiral galaxies where his eyes should be. I wanted to see his eyes but was afraid, too.

“You’re my father,” I said, without waiting for him to speak, though my words sounded awkward and pained. “You tried to kill me.”

The man leaned forward, though not far enough to reveal his face. I wondered if he even had a face. He touched my armored right hand. I managed not to flinch though it was difficult: His touch was fleeting, his large, elegant hand made entirely of silver metal.

“All separations are violent,”
he murmured.
“I would never try to kill you.”

“But you set a trap. You ripped the boys off my body. Why would you do that?”

My voice shook when I said those words. Grief and anger, burning through me with agonizing, brutal force. My head began throbbing.
The boys. My boys, gone.

My family. My heart. Ripped away.

Now I was their weapon. Now I was the prisoner. Now I was at the mercy of their hearts.

The man sighed, and the sound was soft, like the breeze. Without seeing his face it was easy to imagine there was no man, no flesh and bone, but just a ghost, a figment of my imagination. A dream.

“We are all dreams,”
he whispered, and then:
“I had two reasons. I wanted you to learn that you can live without them. That when you have your own daughter, it will not be a death sentence. You can survive. You can live to be an old woman.”

He paused a heartbeat, while I soaked that in.
“You are not alive because of them. You are alive because of
you
.”

Before I could respond, he added,
“The second reason is that soon you will have a choice to make. I wanted your little Kings to have a similar choice. The same
freedom
to choose. It will matter, in time.”

I tried to push off the covers, but my arms were too weak. My legs wouldn’t even move. I felt them—silk sheets rubbing my skin, an itch beneath my knee—but the overall sensation was one of compression, as though some great weight were bearing down. Holding me still.

Blood dripped from my nose. I tasted it on my lip.

“Why?” I asked, hoarse with fear. “Why does it matter?”

“Something is coming,”
he said, his quiet, deep voice floating from that field of stars.
“Ask Zee. Ask him to tell you what terrifies a Reaper King.”

CHAPTER 22

T
HE next time I opened my eyes, I was back in the desert. Words, ringing through my mind. More questions, too.

I started to sit up and stopped. Dek and Mal were stiff on my shoulders, staring to my left with quivering intensity. I followed their gazes and took a sharp breath.

On the other side of the fire sprawled an old man.

He was big. Not just fat, but muscular, with a barrel-chested heft that made me think of orators and mountain men. He wore loose, charcoal gray slacks, and a dark button-up shirt of the same color. His hair was streaked with silver, and his craggy face was familiar though it took me a full minute to figure out why.

It was the man from the warehouse, who had tried to save baby Andrew—and gotten his leg ripped off for his trouble.

He had his leg now, though. Right there in front of me, plain as day. He also had a new scar over his eye.

I looked for Grant and found him beside me, easing a thick sandwich from a plastic bag. He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised, with familiar, comforting wryness.

Only one person could inspire that particular look on my husband’s face.

I studied the old man again, searching those eyes, the set of that mouth, looking for anything familiar. It was not until the man spoke, however, that I knew for certain.

“Sweet girl,” said my grandfather, Jack. “It’s good to see your face.”

OLD Wolf. Jack Meddle.

He had so many names, and had lived so many lives—as a god, a legend, and ordinary man. I would never know his story. I would never entirely understand him.

I’d seen my grandfather a month ago, at the burial of his former body. Decades previous, he’d met my grandmother during her travels through Central Asia. He had known each of my ancestors, but somehow, in some way, Jean Kiss had been different from all of them.

They’d fallen in love.

A taboo. If the other Aetar ever discovered that Jack had interfered with my bloodline . . .
something
bad would happen. I didn’t know what, but I’d seen how some of his kind worked, and it was ugly as hell.

He was family, though—the closest thing to a living relative I would ever have. Good to see him, though I might have been more excited had he shown up a few days earlier.