Heaven's Bones (15 page)

She fought the urge to scuttle away like a crab.

Sight and Curse were the two gifts of the Vadoma, and so far Sight was all she knew. She reached out with her mind, her thoughts brushing against Tibor's, and felt behind them his enormous power of Cursing.

She resisted her instinct to flee and stepped toward her twin.

She felt his power focus on her, away from the horses and the Vistani camp, felt the spell of the dance fade away, felt the confusion of the Vadoma as their steps faltered and they came to themselves.

He was drunk on death and the power death gave him, she saw, and unable to think clearly. That gave her a chance.

She stood before him and reached out, taking the stiletto-like blade from his left hand, the handle sticky with horses' blood. He let her take it.

“I always knew we'd be together,” he said, gently as a lover. Jaelle felt cold down to her belly. She mastered herself and stepped into his embrace.

“Sister,” he murmured, drawing her to him.

“Brother,” she replied, plunging the knife into his belly as deeply as she could.

The mist was getting thicker, but a Vistana knows how to run through the mist without misstep. Swiftly they ran through the grasses and down the slope and they saw them, brother and sister in close embrace, night-fog puddling around their feet, and the shambles of dead horses behind them. The clan clustered behind Serge and Sonja, seeing the destruction of the season's work and the doom of their tribe before them.

As they watched, Jaelle made a sudden movement, still locked in her brother's arms, and Tibor jerked in her grasp and stared down at her, openmouthed.

They saw Tibor raise his arm behind Jaelle's back, pause, and thrust the blade down between her ribs. Jaelle cried out but didn't pull away.

Mari screamed and started forward toward her cousin, but Sonja pulled her back violently.

“I curse you, Tibor Vadoma, who killed your mother and disgraced your gift,” she screamed, slashing the air before her with a complicated motion.

“We can't save her now,” said Serge to the sobbing Mari at his feet.

Sonja continued. “I cast you out. I take away your name. Tibor Vadoma is no more, and never was.” Her face was distorted with hatred, and the mist rose thicker and thicker from the ground.

“I cast you out. I take away your name,” cried Mari, rising to her knees, and the phrase was echoed over and over again, until the entire tribe cursed Mirela's son from the day of his birth and onward.

Pain slashed red-hot across Jaelle's back; she gritted her teeth and pushed the blade up, ripping her brother's abdomen.

“I curse you, Tibor Vadoma,” she gasped, staring up into his face. His eyes had been wide and astonished, and now they were clouding with hatred.

Behind the agony between her ribs she felt
power
, the power from the slaughtered horses, flowing through Tibor into her. She, too, felt drunk with the power to curse. “I cast you out,” she spat. “I take away your name.”

She sagged in his arms as the mist boiled around them, tearing her brother asunder, tearing her wounded body away from his embrace and from her home, pulling her through the barrier between worlds.

The Vadoma watched as the mist cleared, leaving nothing where Jaelle and her nameless brother had stood. The air was heavy with the smell of blood. They could see the bodies of animals, released from their torment, piled in a heap inside the pen that they'd never even tried to escape from.

Serge spoke into the silence. “The Dukkar shall no longer live amongst us,” he said. “From now on, we shall be as other Vistani, and the boy cursed with Sight shall die as an infant.”

No one answered him as the moon rose over the torn, blackened earth.

Robarts glanced ahead and winced. A pigeon was crushed in the busy London street—perhaps by a cart or simply taken unexpectedly by the press of the crowd. The body was a bloodied mass of feathers, and one wing extended incongruously, perpendicular to the flattened body. Somehow the wing of the dead bird had avoided damage and stretched up into the air, spread as if about to take flight, and the feathers and the articulation of the joints as clear as if it had been an illustration in an ornithologist's manual.

Despite himself he drew closer, allowing the pressure of the bustling masses to push him forward until he stood before the bird. A pigeon was little better than a rat, he knew—filthy and unbeautiful and a danger to the public health. Yet there was grace in the wing, which arched up, fragile and beautiful.

It looked like the wing of an angel, stretched out protectively, as in a Renaissance painting of the Holy Family with Gabriel hovering above.

Wings.

Of course.
How were they to fly without wings?

He closed his eyes, seeing a twisted figure falling through an eternal abyss made of smoke and cloud, hands raised beseechingly to heaven—a figure with Margaret's face, and raw fleshy stumps where her wings had been torn away.

Someone thumped into him with an oath and the vision was
gone. Robarts looked around confusedly. The sidewalks were full of people, strangers shoulder to shoulder about their business, or seeking work, or just trying to get home. The mangled pigeon was gone, kicked to pieces by the crowd and scattered in the gutter.

He moved on with the crowd, first glancing at the dirty gray sky, half-expecting to see an amputated angel miles above, plummeting toward them.

“Beg pardon, sir.”

A woman with a faded scarf wrapped about her head was trying to get past him, her market basket on her hip and a child, a little dirty-faced blonde girl, clinging to her side. He stammered out an apology and moved aside and she passed by, weariness imprinted in the angles of her body and the defeated curve of her shoulders.

Of course she's tired, Robarts thought, sparing a backward glance. They've taken her wings.

He shouldered onward in the crowd, slipping his hand in his trouser pocket and feeling the reassuring solidity of the St. Margaret's medal between his fingers.

Robarts unlocked the front door of his rooms. He had dismissed even his London servants, as well as those at Bryani House, so there was no one there to let him in.

The foyer had the strong odor of antiseptic; the smell grew stronger as he went through the sitting room, through the kitchen, and let himself through another locked door in the back of the terrace house. His footsteps echoed loudly through the empty rooms; through the little consulting room, now very dusty with no one to keep it clean, and into the examining room behind.

He closed the examining room door, locked it in its turn, and stood with his back against it, watching his angels.

The two women lay immobile on padded tables. There were straps around their chests and across their legs, fastened underneath their improvised beds, but those were only for safety's sake, to keep them from falling off. They had not tried to escape his laboratory.

They wore simple shifts, and each had a black rubber tube protruding from the corner of her mouth. The other end reached down the back of their throats, halfway down the esophagus.

The tubes were to keep their air passages open, for they still breathed, although very slowly—perhaps once a minute; he'd timed them at one point.

He still didn't understand how that was possible.

It happened when he had the one called Nellie—he'd heard someone call out her name when he decided to take her—on his table; he hadn't bothered to coax her inside, but had come upon her in the fog and overpowered her without much effort, assisted by a bottle of chloroform and a clean rag. She was tiny, almost child sized, and it was easy to wrap her in an extra coat and carry her over his shoulder to his rooms.

He was going to use the ether to subdue her further, although it would be tricky without assistance—the fumes from the chloroform were unpleasant for both doctor and patient, he had found, and he used it in his practice as little as possible.

Then, as he positioned the awkward mask over her face, the voice spoke in his head—but so real and tangible he glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was there.

Not like that
, it said.

He paused. He had learned to trust the voice. So far it had guided him true, and kept him steadfast on his course. He would listen.

Robarts waited, hand hovering over the girl.

Open yourself to me
.

That took more than trust. “How?” he asked aloud, and the girl on the table turned her head restlessly.

Open. Let me inside the passages of your body
.

The sane part of Robarts hesitated. But the command was too strong; he put the ether mask aside and stood, his arms spread to either side, making his mind a blank, letting his muscles relax.

Something cool seemed to fill him, starting in the pit of his stomach and extending throughout his abdomen, up past his chest, down into his groin. It flowed like a cold stream through his legs and arms, trickling into feet and fingers.