Bone Walker (24 page)

“Your terms are accepted. The bargain is made.”

The Queen's last words pealed through me, straight into my blood and bone, on a current of power that made my every muscle shudder with the need to drink it in, to nourish myself upon it like the tree I'd dreamed of being. For an instant, I
was
that tree again. Luciriel's hand against mine was the earth to hold me rooted, her magic my life-giving air.

Then that magic blotted out all else, and the hearth, the furniture, and even the Queen herself vanished in a wash of silver light.

When I came back to myself, the first thing I noticed was that I was not back in Kobe Terrace Park—the cool marble floor beneath me and the high vaulted ceiling above were dead giveaways for that.
So were the will-of-the-wisp balls of light that glimmered in ornate sconces upon the walls in the same unearthly hues as the fire in the hearth of the room I'd just left. But before I could give in to a surge of fury at being cheated, the second thing I noticed cut me short.

Elessir was shaking me, with a strain in his expression that looked suspiciously like fright. Fright lurked in his voice, too, just beneath words that held no trace whatsoever of his affected drawl.

“Miss Thompson, if you can hear me, now would be a very good time to wake up.”

“I'm here, I'm here,” I grumbled, shoving blearily at his hands. They retreated so fast that I might as well have been on fire, and the sheer shock of that—not to mention his presence in general—made me sit up and take full stock of him. He didn't look any different than when I'd last seen him, except for the returned focus to his eyes and a betraying tinge of red along his fine-boned cheeks. At that, I couldn't help but gape. “Holy crap. Are you blushing?”

The instant the words left my mouth, I remembered exactly what we'd been doing when I'd last seen him. Heat rushed down my entire face, from my scalp clear down to the hollow of my throat, and only then did Elessir shoot me a sarcastic smile. “Our Queen excels at orchestrating discomfiting circumstances,” he said. “You'd best accustom yourself to that.”

“She's not my Queen,” I snapped. Not daring to look at him, I scrambled to my feet to try to figure out where Luciriel had dumped us. I saw marble floor in all directions, as well as marble-trimmed walls with row upon row of carved stone panels. “And if she's gone back on the deal we just made, she's not going to be my Queen ever!”

“Wait.” Elessir, leaping up beside me, grabbed my arm and spun me around to face him. “Her power's all over you, I can tell. How did she lure you in? What did she promise you?”

His renewed contact wasn't helping the blush situation any. If anything, I felt that heat suffusing my face roll straight down to where his hand gripped my elbow. But I stared at him anyway, exhausted past the point of caring, and said, “You, for starters.” His expression changed, heat of his own sparking in his midnight gaze, and I added bluntly, “Yes, like that. I didn't take her up on that part.”

“Then what did you take her up on, pray tell?”

“A stay in her Court. In exchange, she releases you and puts us back in Seattle, she and everyone who serves her leaves everyone in Seattle alone, and she hands over a means to take down the bone walker.” Yanking my arm from his grasp, I waved it at our cold, bare surroundings and began to pace back and forth. “Not that this is the park we just left! Goddamn it, why didn't I listen to Millie? She's told me over and over. Do not bargain with the Sidhe!”

“Miss Thompson—”

“But what the fuck was I supposed to have done? There's no way I could have taken her and I don't know how to get back and
goddamn
it, they need me—”

“Miss Thompson!”

The Unseelie's voice, sharper now, pierced through the wave of helpless fury swamping me; I stopped pacing, and glared back at him once more. “What?”

“If I understand you correctly, the Queen has not betrayed your bargain. Not yet at any rate.” Elessir looked thunderstruck now, standing there with eyes gone wide in his pale face as if someone had slammed a board into the back of his head. “I know this place.”

That was enough to finally and fully seize my attention. I blinked at my companion, and then took another, longer look at our locale, and realized at last that I too knew where we were—or at any rate, what kind of place we were in. “This is a mausoleum,” I blurted, a chill rolling down my spine as I clued in.

What in the name of all that was holy was Luciriel doing dropping us here?

“An ossuary, actually,” Elessir whispered. “This is where the Court of the Unseelie stores the bones of its noblest dead.”

He turned in a slow circle, his gaze coursing intently over the stone panels in immediate sight, and as I followed the path of his attention I began to take in more of their details. All of them bore writing in a flowing script I'd never seen before, short enough chains of symbols that it didn't take much to guess that they were names. Next to almost all of these unreadable characters were larger, more stylized sigils. Some of these, at least, were discernible on first glance. I saw many trees and seven-pointed stars, crescent moons and full-antlered stags. Whether the Unseelie divided themselves into Houses like the Seelie did, I had no idea, but whether I was looking at House symbols didn't seem nearly as important as the purpose of the place itself.

“Who qualifies as noblest?” I asked, and I wasn't at all surprised by the answer that Elessir gave me.

“Mages. The Queen claims the bones of all the magic-wielding dead, because even their bones have power…” The bard trailed off, and then abruptly burst into motion, scanning down the rows upon rows of names he passed, a hand outstretched yet not touching a single one.

I followed him, of course, not willing to let him out of my sight—but seized, too, by burgeoning curiosity. When he stopped before one particular set of panels, I didn't need to be able to read the name that had attracted him. The stricken gaze he gave it, as if the letters carved into the stone might at any moment engulf him in flame, was all the hint I needed as to whose resting place we'd just found.

“That's hers, isn't it?” Elessir didn't answer me, but I kept speaking anyway, troubled by his haunted eyes. I couldn't bring myself to speak politely of the creature that had nearly killed my best friend, yet I suddenly couldn't quite lambast her either, not in this place of silent death. He'd said her name, I remembered, though I couldn't recall what it was. “Your wife's.”

“Melorite,” he rasped.

“So Luciriel sent us here to get her bones?”

“She would have used them to raise her as an
alokhiu
. What's left of her would be linked to them now. Destroy the bones, and we destroy the remnant of her spirit. She'll be at rest. Permanently.”

A tangle of emotion I couldn't begin to unravel tightened Elessir's features as he uttered each hollow-toned word, so softly that I could barely hear him. All I could think as I watched him was that whether he had loved her was far too personal a question to ask. “How did she die?” I asked instead.

Mirthlessly, his attention never leaving the name carved into the stone before him, Elessir smirked. “At the Queen's hand, of course. Melorite was always a better mage than I—and more ambitious as well. I simply wanted out of the Court. She wanted to rule it.” He looked at me then, with a gaze every bit as tired as I felt. “As much as I hate that you had to do it, you were wise to keep from defying Luciriel. She does not take well to challengers.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn't exactly brimming over with options.”

“Yet you included me as a condition of your bargain, even if not quite as Her Majesty proposed. You could have left me in her power.”

Once again I did my best to shrug him off. “Not so much. I don't like seeing anyone bullied, even you.”
Change topics,
the back of my brain immediately chimed in, flashing every warning sign I could think of across my mind's eye. Detour. No unauthorized access. Beach logs kill. “So if we're meant to use the bones, how are we supposed to get at them?”

Out of general nervousness I had yet to actually touch the stone that bore the name of the dead Sidhe, taking my cue from Elessir himself. If this was Luciriel's ossuary, and if she called dibs on the bones of Unseelie mages, it stood to reason that they'd be protected against any contact but her own…

Unless she'd cleared it, that is.

Drawing in my breath, I held out my hand to the stone without touching it quite yet. There was no handle on this or any of the other panels, no subtle depressions in the carved stone that might have hidden trigger mechanisms. I didn't bother to look past the one that faced us, and I didn't have to ask if it was Warded. Cool, stinging magic radiated from the stone to my open palm, unnerving me all over again, for it made me think of refrigeration cabinets in morgues.

“Do you know what kind of Wards she sets on these?” I said, not yet ready to risk physical contact, not until I absolutely had to.

“The Queen never limits herself to one kind,” Elessir replied, which was no help at all. “She changes them as she wills. If the Ward doesn't recognize you, it could do anything from paralyzing you to transforming you into whatever shape currently best serves her whims. Or, it might simply melt off your hand.”

Not encouraging. In fact, the very opposite of encouraging. “If this makes me explode,” I told Elessir, carefully avoiding his gaze because I
really
didn't want to see how he might react, “tell Christopher I said I love him.”

Then I pressed my palm against the stone.

Never once in my life had I been foolish enough to touch my tongue to a frozen light pole or street sign—but when the Ward triggered, for one frantic instant, that was exactly what it felt like I'd done. Cold speared up the length of my entire arm, freezing me in place much as Elessir had warned it might, and clamping into my muscles with brutal strength. I would have screamed if I'd been able to breathe. As it was, my jaw began to spasm.

In the next moment, though, the numbing cold retreated. Not to anything resembling warmth, but enough at least to release my hand. I snatched it back, wrapping both my arms around myself to try to stifle my shivering. As I watched, a hole appeared in the stone panel's center, growing progressively wider and taller until every last inch of the stone rippled and vanished into the surrounding marble.

For once Elessir had no sardonic remark. Given what came into view as the panel disappeared, I was speechless myself.

There were no bones revealed to us. There was a skull, though, and at the sight of it, after a few tries, I found my voice. “That can't be real. It's too…” I flailed for words, trying to figure out why I was staring at something so delicate and so pure a white that it seemed made of porcelain rather than a substance that had once been housed in living flesh. Weakly, I finished, “It's too dainty.”

“We're not human,” Elessir reminded me. “Don't expect our bone structures to match what you might have been taught in school.” His mouth curled. “Also, the Queen would not have stored it in anything less than pristine condition.”

I snorted. “Naturally. Well. So far so good.” Famous last words, of course, but I didn't think about that; I was too busy trying not to think very closely about Elessir's ‘we'. Thusly occupied, I lifted the skull from the soft velvet cushion upon which it rested.

And as soon as my fingertips touched the lifeless ivory, I saw her—

Oh all right, I was willing to admit, he was looking svelte tonight. I'd never beheld a male, Seelie, Unseelie, human, or any other race that walked the earth, that could pull off such understated mortal evening wear with such aplomb. He disdained the powdered wigs, the lavish brocaded jackets, and the square-toed shoes that the noble-born men of this nation favored, all of which were gaudy and clumsy compared to the fashions of the Court. Yet even in a simple waistcoat, breeches, stockings, and boots that might as well have been molded to his feet—the only item of Sidhe make he was wearing—my Elessir commanded the stage. And the instant he began to sing, his humble attire became utterly immaterial. I'd humor quite a bit for the sake of that delectable voice—not that I'd ever tell him that.

And from the rapt worship on their faces, it was ridiculously plain that every mortal female in the concert hall and at least five of the males were ready to divest him of those clothes. On any other night, I might have amused myself with the game of guessing which of them he'd thrall, overloading their senses with the power he threaded through the aria until they'd have no idea what gifts they'd offer him, or even what composer's work he'd sung. Tonight, however, I had no intention of sharing him. I'd let him finish the performance. As human languages went, Italian fell more pleasantly upon the ear than others. The new Handel oratorio was deft and nimble, almost worthy of his skill.

After he was done, I would claim him. His mortal sycophants would have to wait.

Oh, they showered him with roses on his final notes. They wept and screamed the name he was using on London's streets. Yet they made way for
me
as I strode down the aisle between the seats, for I didn't scruple to send power streaming out from me in my wake. It cleared my path to my darling consort, and that was all that mattered—that, and the flare of alarm in his eyes as he saw me coming. He quickly suppressed it, but not before I answered it with an anticipatory smile, just enough to give him a taste of my hunger—

—And I shook my head, hard, trying to clear the fragment of vision from my inner sight. It had been bad enough to hear that carnality in Jude's voice. My own mind submerged in it, even for a few passing seconds, was worse. “Jesus,” I croaked, “I need better Wards.”