The Mortal Bone (11 page)

Wouldn’t it?

Mary’s two fingers continued to dig into the skull’s eye sockets, and she crooned a little melody beneath her breath.

“Voices,” she whispered, again. “Voices that bind.”

Raw growled at her. A hard, menacing sound that did not belong in this room, in this company. I had only ever heard him make that sound when he was going to kill someone. I stared at him, startled and uneasy. The way he had growled at Mary . . . like she was prey . . .

Zee gave him a sharp look, snapping his claws. The other demon blinked, choking into silence. Raw barely met my gaze. His eyes were haunted. I reached for him, but he shook his head and backed away. Aaz pulled a pint of chocolate ice cream from the shadows beneath the couch. He gave it to his brother with a sympathetic shrug. Raw slumped on the floor like a little lump and stuffed the entire carton down his throat. I wanted to sit beside him and ask to share.

Mary didn’t seem to notice what had happened. Her legs flexed back down, and she pushed herself off the floor. Grant, who had been making a beeline toward her, turned from that full frontal view with a grimace.

I looked down, too, but not before I saw the stone circle embedded in the old woman’s breastbone.

I hadn’t had many opportunities to see the object grafted into her body. It was a source of curiosity for me, not just for its location but because the sight of it had frightened and angered both the Messenger—and an Aetar, who was now dead. The things they had said about that emblem kept Grant and me up late some nights.

It was a family crest, representing men and women who had been prominent during the war between the Aetar and the Lightbringers. A family, apparently, that had killed
so
many Aetar, they were legend.

Grant’s amulet—inherited from his mother—was also a stone disc. It bore the same family crest.

Mary did not have Grant’s powers, but she
was
from his world: an assassin assigned to protect his mother during their wartime escape through the Labyrinth. The two women had become separated—and, as time moved in odd ways in that place, Mary had grown old before finding her way to earth.

Old,
and
insane. Some days, a little crazier than others.

Her thick white hair was frizzled and wild, her leathery skin pulled tight over hard, sinewy muscles. Not an ounce of fat on her. Mary looked at the boys—and then studied me, with a frown.

“Yes,” I said, wondering if it was just my imagination that I was feeling feverish again. “Something
is
different.”

“Your hearts, split,” she said. “Hearts of murder. Waking from sleep.”

Zee’s spiky spines stiffened. I glanced at Grant, who was peering inside Byron’s room.

“Not here,” he said. “Mary, where’s the boy?”

“Left him downstairs stirring meat,” she told him, picking up a dress heaped in a pile on the floor. It was embroidered with moons and stars, and flying dogs, and hung on her like a sack. Over it she pulled on a leather belt, an old-fashioned back brace that cinched everything tight. It should have looked ridiculous—and maybe it did to everyone else—but I thought it suited her.

I walked into the bedroom. Zee followed. Raw and Aaz were already under the covers, using them as a tent—peering out with teddy bears hugged close to their chests. The entire room was a demon playpen: more bears on the floor, along with magazines and knives, and a slightly chewed life-sized cardboard cutout of Jon Bon Jovi.

I picked a bag of M&Ms off the floor. Tore it open and took a couple. Dek and Mal chirped at me, and I gave them the rest. Then, because standing suddenly seemed like too much effort, I crawled under the covers with the boys, who continued to huddle out of the light. Zee climbed onto the bed.

“Can’t stay here,” he whispered. “Sun is dangerous, Maxine.”

I was so tired. “You said it feeds you.”

“Light makes us strong.” Zee glanced uneasily at the window. “Light reveals.”

“Reveals what?”

He never answered. Grant appeared in the doorway, leaning on his cane—all kinds of shadows in his eyes. “Does the sun do other things to you?”

Zee hesitated. “Ten thousand years, since walked in light. Ten thousand years, forgetting what was, what could be. Don’t know what will happen. Might wake things, better that sleep. Might be . . . dangerous.”

I grabbed his bony wrist and suffered a pang of heartache and loss. My skin looked so pale. So . . . wrong. It didn’t matter that my boys were here. It was day, and I was lonely for them. I didn’t feel whole.

Zee pressed his cheek to my hand, his ears flat against his skull.

“Sweet Maxine,” he whispered.

“I don’t want to be your prison,” I told him, thinking of that crystal skull. “But don’t forget that I am your friend. We’re family, baby.”

“Family,” he murmured, closing his eyes. “Family protects family. Family protects the nest.”

Raw and Aaz poked their heads from beneath the covers. Dek and Mal made a mournful sound, and so did Grant, as he lay down on the other side of the bed and straightened out his bad leg.

“Back in the desert, with Blood Mama . . . you started to change,” he said, forcing Zee to look at him. “I saw it, inside you. What else, Zee? We know what you
were
. Will you become that again?”

“Stop,” I said to him. “They’re not like that.”

Grant gave me a long look. Zee bowed his head, fiddling with his claws.

“Our nest,” he murmured. “Our family. Even as Kings, those things we believed.” The little demon crept backward off the bed. “But there was also the hunt.”

I followed him, or tried. My joints ached, and so did my muscles. Fever prickled. But I kept going, determined not to let him slip away. Irrational, I told myself. Zee wasn’t going anywhere. The boys weren’t going to leave me.

Of course, they will,
came the unbidden thought.
They are free.

“Zee,” I said, and my voice sounded strange in my ears, so rough and broken, it made me stop and listen to my heart and hunger.

I pressed my hands against my stomach, holding them there. Grant touched my thigh. Just with the tips of his fingers, but it helped ease the gaping hole in my chest.

Zee and I stared at each other.

“If the sun is dangerous to you,” I said, hoarsely, “then maybe you and the boys should go.”

He looked around the bedroom, with odd sadness. “The world is dangerous to
you
.”

“I’ll protect her,” Grant said.

The demon flexed his claws. “Not like us.”

I took a breath, and straightened. “I’m getting dressed and going for a walk. I’ll be fine. Zee, you and the boys do what you have to. I’ll be here if you . . . need me.” I forced a smile and slipped off the bed, reaching into a pile of clean clothes for some jeans and a sweater. I bundled them up and went to the bathroom.

I was afraid to look at my reflection. Mirrors and I didn’t mix. I’d had a nightmare once, as a kid. Dreamed I looked into a mirror, only to find . . . something else staring back. Not me. Not a person. Just . . . a thing. A vague shadow, burning with incredible violence. Reaching for me, through the glass.

Sometimes, at night, when I had to the use the bathroom, I refused to look at my reflection. Afraid I’d see that shadow. Afraid something would be there, waiting for me.

I wondered, occasionally, if I hadn’t already caught a glimpse of that shadow in my eyes.

I braced my hands on the sink, looking at myself. Nothing different. Not really. I could tell myself that all day long until I believed it. Until the shadows and the hard glint of my bleeding heart just . . . faded away.

I’d never realized just how pale I was.

Hot water felt good. I took a quick shower, washing away sand and sweat. My muscles ached less. I tried not to think too hard, but at some point I thought about the rose and that message engraved on the stem—and I remembered the sensation of the metal melting, and the sound of the boys, screaming.

And the fall. All of us, falling.

When I left the bathroom, the boys were gone. I hadn’t really expected them to be. I stood a moment, looking around, thinking I’d see a craggy little face peering at me, or a goofy smile, or hear a chorus of high, sweet voices singing rock and roll. But none of that happened.

It hurt more than I could say. It wounded me, and it was childish, stupid. Selfish, even. My boys were free. Why couldn’t I accept that and let them go?

I didn’t like that thought. At all.

Grant sat on the edge of the bed, cane resting across his thighs.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I know you’d like for them to be here. I believe . . . I believe Zee genuinely thinks that it’s dangerous for them to remain in a place where there’s sunlight.”

“Okay.”

“Maxine.”

“I need to be alone,” I said to him.

He raised his brow at me. “That’s the last thing you want. But you’re hurting so bad, you can’t lick your wounds with anyone watching.”

My breath caught. Grant held my gaze, and I knew it was all just one naked parade of my thoughts and emotions. Everything I was, all my bits and pieces, laid bare in whatever light surrounded me. Grant could read it like a book, just as he read everyone. And, like the priest he’d been, he treated all that light like a confession.

So I confessed.

“I feel like part of me died,” I told him. “I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I’d lose them. Not like this.”

Grant looked down, jaw tight. I half expected him to reassure me that they weren’t really gone, that everything would be all right . . . but his silence was long, and heavy. I settled back against the wall. Unable to cross the distance between us.

“Nothing of you died,” he said. “Wounded, maybe. Ripped. I can see parts of your soul, bleeding. Zee and the boys . . . they’re bleeding, too. All of you, in the same spots.” His hands flexed around his cane, so tight, with such strain, I thought he might break it in half. “I could heal that part of you. But I won’t.”

“I didn’t expect you to.” I pushed away from the wall to go to him and sat as close as I could, slipping my arm around his, resting my forehead on his shoulder. “I understand.”

He cleared his throat. “I know you’re not afraid of me for what I did to you today . . . the way I took your concern for the boys, and erased it. But
I’m
afraid. I slipped, and all it took was a second. I’m not . . . used to controlling my voice around you. I’m sorry.”

I smiled against his arm. “You’re not breaking up with me, are you?”

He flinched, giving me a stunned look—which relaxed, only a fraction, when he saw that I was teasing him.

“Not funny,” he said.

“I love that you reacted with horror.”

Grant made a grumbling sound. “You’re going to be fine, Maxine. Wounds heal. I’m here. We have this.” He placed his hand over my heart. “And you’re too stubborn to give up.”

“I notice you don’t include the boys in that statement.”

“You saw what happened with Blood Mama. And Mary.”

Again, I thought about the crystal skull. “And you saw what happened inside me.”

“That . . . thing,” he murmured. “Yes, I saw. I felt its hunger.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Grant took my right hand, twining our fingers: metal, against his flesh. “But you need to be careful of the boys, Maxine. You need to listen to Zee when he tells you that they might change. Because I saw it, out in the desert. They fed on Blood Mama’s pain. They’ve never done that before.”

I looked away and closed my eyes. “I have to believe in them.”

“Well,” he said, softly. “If it helps, they believe in you. And so do I.”

Mary appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, holding the crystal skull under her arm. I didn’t look too hard at that carved face, with its sharp teeth and huge eye sockets. In fact, I didn’t like looking at the skull, period. It gave me the same strange feeling as a mirror: I wasn’t certain what was looking back.

“Know who this is,” she said, with a hint of pride. “Finally recognized the face.”

Grant and I stared at her.

“Er,” I said, wondering just how far in the past Mary had lived, before the Labyrinth had spat her out into modern-day earth. “Who is it?”

Mary lifted her chin, and a cold smile touched her lips.

“Old Wolf,” she said.

CHAPTER 12

I
once asked my grandfather why those who knew him—knew him, really, for what he was—called him
Old Wolf
. He was, after all, immortal. And it seemed to me that when you lived as long as he had, the names that stuck probably had more than passing significance.

“There are many different
kinds
of wolves,” he told me, sipping tea and nudging my foot with his. “On every world, in every variation. It has nothing to do with the actual creature, my dear. More like, the
spirit
of the thing. Its
heart
.”

I leaned against all his books and crates, careful not to tip over the rare porcelain statues, and rocks, and some odd little bird bones gathered in a silver nest. “And what is the heart of the universal wolf?”

My grandfather gave me a mysterious smile.

“Look into your own heart for that answer,” he said, bending forward to pour more tea into my cup. “For we are a
family
of wolves.”