The Mortal Bone (5 page)

If the Aetar learned Grant existed, nothing would stop them from trying to capture him. It was only a matter of time. They had already sent one investigator—a genetically enhanced slave, descendent of a Lightbringer. We had managed to turn her to our side. I didn’t think we’d be so lucky a second time.

But this . . . Grant’s struggle with his power . . .

“I trust you,” I said. “You know that.”

“You’re the only person in this world I can’t affect with my voice.”

“That’s not why I trust you, and you know it.”

Grant shook his head. “Now, when I speak, every sound I make . . . there’s
more
waiting. More power. More . . .
potential
. It feels as though I’m plugging the Hoover Dam with my finger.”

“It’s not the same finger you use to touch my—”

“Maxine.”

“I’m just saying, it’s a
magical
finger. I’m not surprised it can—”

Grant bent and kissed me hard and sloppy on the corner of my mouth. I held up my hands in surrender.

“Listen. Don’t be like me, all gloom and doom, and full of self-doubt. You feel like you’re on the verge of losing control and doing something awful? Been there, done that.” I stood on my toes, gripping the front of his shirt and staring hard into his eyes. “Accidents will happen. Accept that now. You are going to screw up.”

“You always make me feel
so
much better.”

I kissed his chin. “You are my best friend. Nothing you do will change that, ever. Whatever you’re dealing with now? Don’t be afraid of it.” I placed my hand over the amulet hanging beneath his T-shirt. “You’re not alone.”

Grant dragged in a deep breath and placed his large, warm hand against the back of my neck.

“You,” he said, “are my miracle.”

“Dude, I am a miracle
machine
.” I honked his nose. “Face it, you can’t live without me.”

“I can’t,” he said seriously, and smiled. “Really.”

I placed my hand on his chest, savoring the familiar tug between us—like a vein connecting our hearts, pumping life, and light.

Our bond. Lightbringers linked with others as sources of power, but for most of his life, Grant had managed on his own—not realizing he needed to bond with someone in order to survive the full use of his gifts. Fortunately, I had an almost limitless amount of energy to spare.

I couldn’t live without him either, though. But if I admitted that out loud—something he already knew—I’d be more of a mess than him right now.

Gooey. He made me so gooey.

I cleared my throat. “Just remember, if you ever step over a line? I’ll crush you like a bug. That’s my miracle to
you
.”

“You wouldn’t go soft? Not even for your
husband
?”

I tried giving him a grumpy look. “You just like saying that word.”

“I have a
wife
.” Grant wrapped his arms around me in a massive hug that I felt even through my tattoos. “And she can
crush
me like a
bug
.”

I hugged him back, and that ever-present light sparked into a glow that burned like sun-fire.

I needed that light when we finally rounded the outer corner of the homeless shelter—and I saw the blackened remains of the burned apartments. Once they had been homes for families who needed a last boost to get back on their feet. No rent. No one breathing down their necks. Just responsible folk looking for reliable work.

A month later, the apartments still looked awful. Worse than I remembered. A smear on all the good things that had been growing here.

The bowling bag felt heavy. My chest hurt. “You’re sure Rex isn’t just pulling a prank?”

Grant’s hand tightened.

We entered the southern entrance of the homeless shelter, closest to where the fire had burned, and an area that had been cordoned off by safety inspectors. Convenient for us—given that structural damage wasn’t the only reason we didn’t want people in that part of the building.

Rex met us at the door, and his demonic aura was almost as thunderous as his face—so huge and wild, I didn’t know how normal humans could look at him and not see that he was
other
. His possessed body was dark-skinned, older, maybe in his fifties. A red knit cap had been tugged low over his forehead, and he stood straight in a green Windbreaker and jeans.

When I saw his eyes, I knew my answer.

Not a prank. Whatever he had found, it was deadly serious.

“Took you long enough,” he said, with disdain and fear. “The words
Labyrinth
and your
mother
weren’t enough?”

And then he looked down at the bowling bag and frowned.

“What,” he said slowly, “is in
there
?”

Grant grunted. “Later. Where’s the message?”

“Upstairs.” Rex backed back, still staring at the bag. “I didn’t want to move the thing or touch it once I realized what it is.”

I followed, wanting to ask him what he thought was in the bowling bag. “Why do you think it’s from my mother?”

A scowl flitted over his face. “You’ll see.”

A new staircase had been built, the timber raw and unpainted, and a chain-link wall, erected across the hall, blocked off the burned-out area. I smelled food from the cafeteria, which was on the other side of the shelter, and heard low voices and laughter. Music playing. Ella Fitzgerald.

But here, no one. No other footsteps but ours. The click of Grant’s cane was loud on the floor—and then, the new stairs. Rex pulled ahead of us. I lingered, taking up the rear, filled with dread. On my skin, the boys rumbled in their dreams, five hearts beating in unison with mine. It felt like thunder. It felt like I lived inside a storm.

You
are
the storm,
my mother would have said.

The fire had ravaged the entire second floor. Late-afternoon light trickled through the gutted windows and walls, and most of the roof was gone. There was hardly a floor, but a construction team had fixed a walkway that led from the stairwell to the end of the hall. The firm hired to build it had objected, saying there wasn’t much point: That whole side of the warehouse needed to come down.

True. And it would. Once we were certain there was no longer a rip in the fabric of space—just outside the door of the last apartment on the right.

Which wasn’t something we could explain to an architect.

Rex walked halfway down the hall, then stopped and pointed. I didn’t need him to explain. I could see the thing in question. The message.

It was a rose.

CHAPTER 5

T
HERE was something my mother used to say, from a book she loved . . . that you are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

You are responsible for your rose.

But a rose,
she would say,
is never truly tame.

I pushed past both men and walked down the hall. I put down the bowling bag and removed my mother’s jacket. I left both on the walkway. I wanted my arms free.

Crystal skulls. A rose. I suffered the same itch of dread, a rising tension in my chest that made me want to jump out of my skin. The boys felt it, too, shifting over my body, rearranging themselves in a slow liquid burn of muscles and scales, and flexing claws that shimmered and flowed with disconcerting, dizzying effect. Red eyes glinted against my arms. Teeth gleamed.

My boys, watching in their dreams.

I stopped a short distance from the rose, studying it with more care than I would a bomb. I’d never met a bomb, after all, that made me afraid—but this was something different. No human had crafted this rose. No human could have.

Not grown in a garden. Not organic, in any earth sense. Crafted instead from a quicksilver metal that appeared slick and fluid—so wet, it was as though it were made of water, or perhaps mercury, fixed in some dream of roses.

Perfect and unreal.

I crouched, edging closer. Runes covered the petals: knots and tangles of coiled lines that perfectly matched the etched, shifting designs that decorated the armor embedded on my right hand—which tingled, and tugged toward the rose, and grew hot. I curled my hand into a fist and tucked it against my stomach.

Words had been engraved on the stem.

Grant’s cane echoed dully on the walkway and stopped behind me.

“What do you see?” I asked him, my voice little more than a whisper.

“A heartbeat,” he said, just as quietly. “A heartbeat like the one in the crystal skull. That thing is from the Labyrinth.”

I nodded, unsurprised. Just one look was enough to know the truth, after living the past two years with the armor on my hand.

The skull in the bowling bag had been crafted from a fragment of the Labyrinth itself. Now this rose.

Dangerous. Very dangerous.

I moved closer. The letters written on the stem curved around its long thorns. I reached for the rose and deliberately used my left hand.

“Careful,” Grant said.

“Sure,” I lied, and then held my breath as I touched the rose.

Nothing happened. No explosions. No disappearances. No time travel.

I half expected the metal to slip away beneath my fingers, but it remained firm, surprisingly soft, and warm. Almost like human flesh.

I let out my breath and heard Grant do the same. Rex muttered, “Shit, I hate this.”

Me, too,
I thought, trying to stay calm as I brought the stem into the faint light shining through the burned roof. I frowned, peering at the tiny words etched into the metal. A delicate script, but irregular, as though written by hand.

A queer, unpleasant nausea hit me: cold, rippling through my chest, down into my stomach. I swallowed, dizzy. On my skin, the boys tensed, drawing every inch of my body close and tight until I had to hunch like a turtle trying to withdraw into its shell.

I recognized that handwriting. It looked like mine, except for the
e
’s.

My mother had written this. Even the words sounded like her voice.

Remember where your heart rests,
I read.
Remember who you are. No one can take that from you. You are strong alone.

I turned over the rose, studying the other side of the stem.

I leaned back, staring.

“Shit,” I said. “Shit.”

Grant said my name, but I hardly heard him.

My father.
I didn’t know my father. But a month ago, I’d learned that my mother had entered the Labyrinth in her youth . . . and returned to earth, pregnant.

That alone had stunned me. But then Grant and I had shared a vision of a man.

A man who loved my mother.

A man who had given us the information we needed to close the prison veil.

But what did
this
mean? Who the hell sent messages on a fucking rose? Who would go to the trouble, for what I had just read? Not that it wasn’t wonderfully strange to receive a message from my mother . . . but writing a letter and leaving it in a safety-deposit box would have been a hell of a lot easier.

I could read between the lines. This was trouble.

“Maxine,”
Grant said, and his voice was so sharp I blinked, coming back to myself. He was reaching for me, but his gaze was on my left hand—and his urgency made me look down, fast.

The rose was melting. Petals drooping, oozing sideways, all those runes sliding down into the heart of the bloom. My mother’s handwriting, sinking into the stem like little twigs consumed by water.

I tried to drop the rose, but it stuck to my fingers. I stood, shaking my hand, but it wouldn’t come off my skin. Grant reached for the rose. I leapt away, afraid for him to touch it, and wrapped my right hand around the stem.

The armor sparked and twisted—recoiling. I gritted my teeth and held on, pulling with all my strength. It was like trying to yank off my own arm. The rose would not budge.

But it continued to melt—right into my skin.

I stared, horrified, as that liquid metal oozed into my tattoos, soaked up, disappearing as the stem collapsed against my fingers—followed by all those slinking petals that fell into my hand and faded like melting snowflakes.

The boys screamed.

Their voices slammed into me all at once: a hard, rising wail that did not falter, but only grew stronger, more frenzied, slicing through my soul like a falling sword. I staggered, clutching my head, breathless and dazed. Grant shouted my name, but I barely heard him. All that mattered were the boys, filling up my mind with their voices, tearing me apart—not with rage—but with pain and terror.

Then I screamed with them.