The Mortal Bone (27 page)

I glanced back at Jack and found him standing still with the crystal skull clutched to his chest. It glowed with a faint light.

“Go,” he said in a strained voice, without looking at me. “He’s done it.”

I didn’t know what
it
was, but I waded through the Shurik, who trembled and gasped for air with those hideous mouths—but did not bite me.

Grant’s voice dropped to a low, steady hum. The Messenger made the same sound when I reached her, but she was bent over her bonded Mahati warrior, who lay half-sprawled in the sand. Five Shurik were embedded in his legs, torso, and shoulder. Their fat bodies wriggled slowly, jutting from wounds that oozed blood. Ready to eat him from the inside out.

That could have been me.
One heartbeat, one distraction. The Mahati was strong, fast, but he had been overwhelmed.

I realized, finally, what Lord Ha’an had meant when he said the Shurik would have massacred his people had Zee and the boys not intervened.

I’m looking at what will happen to humanity,
I told myself, nausea rising through my disgust and anger.

The Messenger’s voice did not falter when I crouched beside her, nor did she look at me. The Mahati’s gaze was wild, his chest heaving with pain. When the Messenger touched his leg near one of the embedded Shurik, he flinched—but did not fight her.

I grabbed his wrist, hard with muscle and warmer than I expected. “We need to move you.”

“I will do it.” The Messenger stood and picked up the fallen Mahati. He was her height, and bigger, but she slung him into her arms as though he weighed nothing. Her expression was curiously vulnerable.

I lingered behind as she carried him from the Shurik swarm, turning in a slow circle and studying the demons surrounding us. So damn many. Overwhelming numbers. I got the creeps standing there, but I wasn’t even sure they were alive anymore. Not one of them moved.

And then Grant fell silent, and I was certain.

I walked from the swarm, silver whip dragging across dead demons and cutting them as easily as a knife through water. I felt a certain dull satisfaction, but it was shallow and cold. Much like my anger. Not just mine, but the boys.

But where were the boys? Had they not felt I was in danger?

Or were
they
in more danger than I?

The Messenger was on her knees, yanking a dead Shurik from the Mahati’s torso. It made a wet sucking sound, and blood gushed from the wound. The demon stifled a groan, cracking open his eyes to watch as she laid her hands on him and hummed. Jack stood nearby. He didn’t look at me. He faced the dead swarm, clutching the crystal skull, gaze so far away and remote I wasn’t certain he was still inside his body.

Grant was pale, expression stark, hard, as though he had been standing within a terrible wind that had buffeted him raw.

“You okay?” he murmured.

“Fine,” I muttered, barely able to speak past the rising thunder in my chest—those five hearts pounding around mine, filled with fury and hunger—and shock. My side began aching again.

“I need to go to the boys,” I said, grim. “I have to understand what just happened.”

Grant leaned on his cane, staring at me. “You’re crazy.”

“I’m taking the bull by the balls.” I looped the whip into my hand and crouched, poking one of the dead Shurik: bloody, slimy, and shaped like a turd. I wanted to squirm and pull a heebie-jeebies fit but gritted my teeth and stayed where I was, trying not to imagine it eating its own young, or the inside of a human being.

I glanced up at Grant. “How did you stop them?”

He could not hide his regret from me, or his pain.

“I changed them,” he said, hoarse. “I shifted their light. They were being driven by an instinct to kill and feed. It was the same for all of them. I transformed that instinct, in the same way I affect Blood Mama’s parasites.”

And Blood Mama herself,
I almost heard him thinking.

“You cut their bond with the Shurik lord,” Jack said in a tight voice, finally looking at us. “You stopped the flow of energy.”

“If you want to call it that,” he said with particular weariness. “It wasn’t my intention. I altered their souls into something so different from what they were before that whatever the bond held on to no longer existed. It disoriented them, and when they were weak . . .”

He stopped. I reached for his hand, watching his jaw tighten as though he was trying not to be sick.

“It was too easy,” he murmured. “Killing them was like cutting a string.”

Jack stared with haunted eyes. “You’ll have to cut many strings before this is done, lad. You’re a weapon now . . . and doing things my kind never could.”

Grant tensed. The Messenger’s healing hum faltered, and she looked at the old man. All of us did. I felt annoyed with my grandfather and deeply protective of my husband.

I squeezed his hand. “Would that work on me?”

He immediately shook his head with a vehemence that bordered on horror. “I would have to change you, Maxine. I would have to transform your soul so radically, you wouldn’t be the same person. Even then, I don’t know if it would work.”

“You could put me back.”

“You’re not a box of Legos. A soul is energy, and that energy forms a pattern. Once you shift the pattern, you can’t just rearrange it. Not the way it was. Something would be lost.”

“Something’s going to be lost anyway.”

Grant leaned in with hard eyes. “Not like this. We’ll find another way.”

I rocked back on my heels, frustrated and troubled. Not just with his answer but with myself, and my creeping sense of disloyalty—as though I were betraying the boys.

My side ached even harder. I gritted my teeth, swaying backward from the others, breathing long and deep through my nose. My chest felt too full, swollen with a hard knot of emotion that seemed to buzz through me with unsettled, wild power. Made me feel trapped. Shoved into a small, terrible cage. My right hand tightened around the whip so hard, my fingers ached.

I tried looking at the stars, the desert, anything to alleviate my claustrophobia. Instead, I felt dizzy, and a strange keening ache spread from the boys into my heart. I bent over, holding my chest as that ache was followed by a wash of rage and shock, and despair. Our bond felt sick with fear. Pain splashed against my skin, long, dragging cuts that sank into my nerves like fire. I looked, but found no wounds. The pain was real, though. Too real.

“Maxine,” Grant said with concern, staring at me as though he could see the wounds. I reached for him, but before our hands met, I felt a cool rush of air over my back. Jack cursed, and the Messenger stiffened. Her Mahati warrior snarled, struggling to sit up.

I turned, and found three men behind us.

The tallest, standing in front, was young, tanned, and extremely good-looking. Vaguely familiar, even. I was certain I had seen him on television or in a magazine. Of course, I was just as certain that whoever that young man
had
been, he was likely as good as dead. His eyes gave him away. No one else could have those cold, dead eyes.

“Draean,” I said. “I thought Zee might have killed you.”

A mirthless smile touched his stolen mouth, but that faded as he turned in a slow circle and gazed upon the dead Shurik swarm at his feet. The men with him, also young and handsome, did the same. Shock filled their eyes. One of them spat, as though ill. Between them, they held an iron chest, which nearly slipped from their hands.

“I did not believe it,” whispered the demon lord, reaching down to pick up one of the dead Shurik. He pressed the slimy corpse to his cheek with disconcerting tenderness and closed his eyes. “I cannot even hear their songs, in death.”

A lump squirmed down the side of his throat. Similar knots moved beneath the clothes of the men with him: down a thigh, across a chest.

I let the whip uncoil and drag through the sand, light and quick, and deadly. The hissing sound it made brought Lord Draean’s attention back to me, his eyes flickering open with hate.

“How?” he whispered.

I swayed forward. Grant moved with me. So did Jack, though I did not look at them. I felt their heat, like a wall at my back. I listened to the Messenger’s robes rustle as she rose from the Mahati’s side.

“How?” I whispered, fury rising inside me, a terrible killing rage that was mine and dwarfed even those five hearts racing. “Because we’re stronger than you, motherfucker.”

Lord Draean bared his teeth. “Strong? You are human. You are cattle. I have eaten more of your kind than your dreams can hold. I have suckled mountains of bones. I never met strength in any human that I could not overcome.”

I smiled and planted my foot on one of his dead Shurik. I pressed down hard, and guts oozed from its mouth. “Your corpse is going to end up on a stick, roasting over my fire.”

Lord Draean threw back his head, laughing. Blood dribbled down the sides of his mouth, seeping from the corners of his eyes. He tossed down the body in his hands and stomped on it, grinding in his bootheel.

“Human whore,” he said, with disdain. “Whore to old Kings who are useless and broken. I will savor your skin.”

Grant stepped forward. “You’ll do no such thing.”

Draean gave him a sharp look. “What is in your voice?”

“Transformation,” whispered my husband, and the power in that one soft word was lush and thick, rolling around us with an almost physical presence. He ended that word on a hum, a rippling sound with so much weight I felt as though I were listening to a thousand hands pulling, pulling on the air, on my body, on the ground beneath my feet.

“What,” Draean began, then backed away, as though truly startled. “No. Your kind are dead.”

Grant leaned hard on his cane, eyes flecked with gold. Jack swayed close to my side, holding the crystal skull—which glowed between his large hands.

“No,” murmured my grandfather. “The Lightbringers are not yet dead.”

Draean seemed stunned. “You. The Wolf.”

Jack bowed his head, and the crystal skull exploded with light.

White light, starlight, blinding and cold as a winter. A blast of freezing air hit me, and I flinched, staggering back as the light from the skull slammed into the demon lord and his men. Screams tore from their throats—their sagging, melting throats—which split open like ripe fruit, gushing blood. I watched in fascination and horror as their flesh melted, dropping away in wet chunks that seeped foul-smelling bile. All those men—Lord Draean—liquefying in their clothing.

And from that liquid dropped three squirming slugs.

One was larger than the others, the same color as a muddy ruby, pulsing with bright orange veins that glowed as though lit from within by fire. Long crimson teeth gnashed, and a long tongue snaked out, the tip shaped like a spoon. Ugly as hell.

I lunged forward, cracking my whip down like silver lightning. Draean was impossibly fast, darting sideways—but the very tip of my weapon sliced off part of his side, and the cry that rolled from him was shocking—and shocked.

Before I could bring down my whip a second time, the Shurik who had accompanied Draean attacked. I danced aside, heart pounding, watching teeth flash—and heard a sharp cry behind me, sharp as a thunder crack. Grant.

Those two small bodies writhed in midair and dropped. Dead.

When I looked for Draean again, he was gone. He had run.

I stood there, breathing hard, adrenaline pouring through me—and a fierce, ugly smile touched my mouth. My smile. Not the darkness, not the boys. All that viciousness was mine alone, and it felt good.

I looked back at Jack and Grant. “We have a chance.”

Neither man smiled back. My grandfather’s eyes were haunted, his skin shining with sweat. His grip on that crystal skull was white-knuckled, and when he looked down at the artifact, an expression of pure revulsion and dread passed over his face.

Grant was steadier and gave me a faint nod, determination in his eyes.

The Messenger strode past us toward the chest that the Shurik had dropped. She circled it with a frown. I joined her, and all the ferocious energy pouring through me prickled and grew quiet. I had a bad feeling, suddenly. Inexplicably bad.

The chest was unlocked. I hesitated, then lifted the lid.

My knees buckled. My heart.

Zee was inside. Broken and bleeding.

CHAPTER 24

I
dropped to my knees, unable to breathe. Searching my heart, my soul, for those five heartbeats. Precious heartbeats.

All of them were subdued, quiet. No emotion leaking through.

I didn’t know what that meant. Were they unconscious? Near death? How the hell had this happened?

“Zee,” I whispered, dragging his sharp, small body from the chest. I hardly knew where to touch him. Black blood oozed from multiple lacerations that looked like flog marks. His throat had been partially cut, as had one ear. He had a gash in his side the size of my fist. It was in the same spot where I suffered that dull, persistent ache.

He was limp and unresponsive, a jumble of angular limbs and claws that dangled, flopped. I held him close, whispering his name. He didn’t even twitch. My only consolation was his slow heartbeat inside my chest—but even that was ragged, dull.

“Grant,” I said, hoarse.

My husband grunted with pain, thumping down beside me and wincing as his bad knee popped and cracked. “Give him to me.”

I shook my head, hugging Zee closer. “Just tell me what you see.”

“He’s mortal,” Grant said, after a moment.