Bone Walker (30 page)

With me.

The sight of my own body ominously slack and still in his grasp—and defended by Christopher, a one-man wall of light—galvanized me. A few frantic thrashings of my will got me nothing. I couldn't stop Melorite's dive-bomb run, and the moment I tried to wrestle her for physical control, a new wave of stultifying chill slowed me down.
None of that
, the bone walker crooned, almost singing it, as she went for a second strike at me.

This time the pleasure was deeper and sharper, and I could think nothing except the glorious temptation of losing myself in the powerful body she commanded. She was strength and speed beyond compare, and I could be part of that skyborne grace. All I had to do was root myself within her, as I'd done in the rowan dream, and let her be my sunlight and air, my blood, my breath, my nerves. All I had to do was nourish her.

Luciriel wants you! Luciriel can't have you, Kennie dearest! I want you.

I'd never have to join the Unseelie Court, would I, if I remained part of the bone walker?

You and me,
chica
mine. See how it feels? Think how beautiful it would be to help me destroy that pretty shining Warder boy. And oh yes, my darling husband, in case you think I hadn't noticed him. You don't need them. You need me. Together we could even challenge the Queen herself!

And as if to drive home her point, she arrowed straight down for Christopher, only to slam headlong into the Ward my man was hurling into the air. She didn't make it—but as that impact resounded down her bones, I felt that vital something she'd drained from me crackle out into the Ward-light. Horror and glee shot through me when the protective shielding buckled, and the really scary part was, I couldn't tell which emotion was properly mine.

It wasn't too hard to swing over to horror, though, because son of a goddamn bitch, she was using my magic to batter Christopher's Wards. Millicent's too, now, since through Melorite's eyes, I glimpsed the older Warder at her Second's side. Millie's older power flowed in to fill the cracks in Christopher's defense, but not hard enough, not fast enough—not when she was firing her shotgun at the same time.

The blast took Melorite right in the eye, making her spit a volley of lightning in retaliation. Each bolt sent new cracks splintering through the Wards. Each one sent new waves of dizzying weakness through me, each one a little more intense than the last. By the third, I was bowled over with an interior vision of Melorite's arms—her original arms—hurling those lightning strikes. By the fourth, I could see my own arms moving in unison with hers. By the fifth, I was almost looking forward to what she would do next in her magnificent rage as long as we would continue to dance as one.

But only almost.

I knew when I was outclassed. The Unseelie Queen herself had taught me how to recognize that. And okay yeah fine, I was still pretty much in magical elementary school. But after spending two months learning magic with a couple of Warders, there was one thing I was dead certain I could do: shield myself. There was no breaking out of Melorite's control, not when her every thought was overpowering temptation.

So if I couldn't break out, that left me no other option but to break inward instead.

Quite literally, I was flying blind. Yet every instinct I had warned now that I had to play this as subtly as possible. As best I could, as small as I could, I curled my awareness in upon itself. It hurt. Pulling power around that core of me, as if I were wrapping myself in a blanket, hurt too. I crept through it anyway, even as I remembered Elessir's brief advice on the way into Kobe Terrace Park.

Touch your surroundings. Don't hide from them.

Which meant I had to try to shield myself from Melorite by not hiding from her. What could possibly go wrong?

That way lay hysteria, so I forced off the panic and focused instead on quietly weaving that blanket of power around me—while keeping a strand still reaching out from me, just enough to persuade the
alokhiu
that there was nothing to see, move along. Far, far too much of me shrieked in protest that I was siphoning too much power away from Melorite's voracious need. I forced that off too, right along with any thought of what the body I was riding around in was doing in the meantime.

I lost track of external senses, of sight and speed, sound and movement. At last, when I pulled my blanket of magic entirely closed, I even blunted the numbing bite of my captor's consciousness. Victory. I would have wept in relief if I could. As it stood, I settled for hovering there in white-golden silence as I greedily seized the opportunity to regroup.

That was when I found Saeko.

There wasn't any coherent thought, just a flare of wordless terror that shot up from somewhere deeper still within the dragon's form, deeper than wherever it was I floated. It fizzled and began to fade even as I sensed it, like a firework badly launched. But there was enough for me to latch onto, because God help me, whatever it was, I could tell it wasn't Melorite. As surreptitiously as I dared, scared to death that I'd break the shield I'd raised around myself if I thought too loudly, I reached inward to that feeble spark of a presence.

Saeko? Saeko honey? Is that you? My name is Kendis!

Something rippled, all the warning I had before I caught a blast of panicked distrust that nearly freaked me out all over again from the sheer strength of it. I had to divert all my attention to holding my shield steady. Only then, when I was certain it would hold, did I offer the source of that panic the first thing I could think of: the memory of my jumping to scoop her up out of harm's way when I'd thought her mother and brothers in their
nogitsune
shapes were after her. Right on the heels of that, I offered a promise of my arms carrying her straight to her mother.

An even bigger blast of reaction wrenched right through me with its clarity, the pure unvarnished pain of a terrified child wanting to sob her eyes out. That changed everything. The kid was still alive, frightened beyond all reason, and unable to be comforted because she didn't have access to her mother—not to mention her own rightful eyes.

No way I could let that stand.

So I held out through the onslaught of her panic, and then offered a burst of further images: being held. Being hugged. Running, jumping, or even flying as she wanted to, in either of her true and proper shapes, because this was after all a dragon child. Most of all, and most importantly, I proffered her mother's nearness and readiness to fight to get her back.

Come with me, Saeko! Let me help you get back to your momma!

Before I was even done forming the thought, Saeko Asakura's young mind swamped mine—but not as Melorite had done, to dominate or subsume. Rather, my consciousness lit up with the sensation of small arms clinging to me with all their might, while a third wave of terror crackled through me like the lightning the
alokhiu
had called down out of the skies.

I WANT MY MOMMY!

This, apparently, was what it felt like when a six-year-old dragon roared, stranded in the confines of her own mind. Later—much later, maybe—I might giggle at that. Right then, though, it was anything but funny. I enfolded Saeko in as much confidence as I could muster, the best I could do until I got back my own arms.
Hang on, kiddo,
I urged her.
Think about flying!

Then I threw my attention back outward. With Saeko's strength bolstering mine, I tore down the shield that had protected us both.

The instant it fell, Melorite's wrath nearly bowled us back under all over again, but Saeko and I careened through it nonetheless. All at once physical sensation came back to me in a great jumbled wave: wind and rain against scales, sinewy muscles writhing, and a crackle of power threatening to erupt at any moment in lightning. I glimpsed ragged swaths of cloud, a patch of sky that spun down to the dazzling radiance of Christopher and Millicent's Ward-light. And, in a further dizzying rush, I spotted the storm-battered ground about two seconds before we crashed into it hard.

Saeko screamed, echoing across my awareness as both sound and emotion. That was all I could clearly sense before the bone walker's magic whipped around me in bands of strangling cold. Now, though, I had momentum, and I had goals. Get the
alokhiu
away from the kid. Get back into my body where I belonged. Everything else on top of that would be cake.

So I fought back, grabbing hold of those bands of frost and pulling them as hard as I possibly could until they broke. Once again the world spun, and for an instant, I lost track of what few physical perceptions I'd regained. For an instant, I was nothing but pure conscious magic, uncloaked by flesh.

Then I was convulsing in Elessir's hold, all my limbs flailing, my chest constricting in agony as I struggled to remember how to breathe. Through sparks of hot white light in my vision I saw the bard leaning over me, his face alive with worry. Just behind him I spotted Christopher, whirling to face us, the bright gold of his gaze doing nothing to diminish his own desperation. If anything, it hurled it into sharp relief.

Somewhere nearby I sensed rather than saw Millicent. Her magic steamrollered over me even as she bellowed, “Goddamn it! The thing's in her now!”

Only then did I realize I hadn't escaped Saeko's hijacked dragon form alone. Melorite's laughter exploded across my mind, driving the point home, with a thousand little spikes of cold stabbing at me from within my own flesh.

Isn't this just delicious? Oh,
chica
mine, it is ON!

Advantage, me: I was back on my home turf.
Or more specifically, back
in
my home turf. My magic surged, reestablishing its link with the flesh it was born in, and for a heartbeat I thought I'd be able to expel my intruder.

Except, advantage, Melorite: She was much, much older than me, with all the experience that implied, and I wasn't the first body she'd taken.

Result: the bone walker won the toss to seize first control of my form. While I launched a frenzied assault on the insides of my own skull, she chuckled deep in my throat, wrapped my arms around Elessir's neck, and kissed him—for about a second and a half. The Unseelie let me go so fast I might as well have spontaneously combusted, leaping up and backwards, his eyes gone wide with horror.

Cat-like, my body rose to its feet and turned in a slow circle, taking in the sight of the others around me. Millicent and Christopher hemmed me in with a ring of golden light bright enough that it made the stormy night seem like noon. For good measure, Millie now had Butch pointed straight at my head, a sight that mortified me even as it made Melorite laugh all the louder. Nor did Elessir back off far, and he had a hand now on the sheath he was wearing, ready to draw Melisanda's borrowed sword.

Just beyond them, outside the light, Makiko and her sons rushed to the limp form of the young dragon. A dragon which, even as I glanced her way, began to shimmer and collapse in shape, shrinking down to the proportions of Saeko's bipedal form. As she changed the rain and wind began to subside, until I could feel little more than drizzle hitting my already soaked hair.

“A pity,” Melorite purred, running my hands possessively down the line of my hips. Bitch. “That one had more raw power, but there are advantages to being in a body that's properly grown.” She slid my gaze from Elessir to Christopher and back again, adding, “She likes you both, you know, and I can see why. You're both so very,
very
pretty. How badly do you boys want her to live?”

“Honey, you can't believe we're going to let you actually stay in there,” Millicent said, her grip on her shotgun never wavering.

“Oh, come now, Lady Warder,
you
can't believe I'm the slightest bit concerned you're going to use that thing. You can't risk blowing our darling Kendis' head right off her shoulders, can you?”

Even as she hurled that disdainful challenge, Melorite whipped about on my heel, and I felt her restlessly intending to pace the confines of the circle the Warders had whipped up around us. But before she could take a step, Christopher lunged forward and grabbed my nearest arm. His face had gone as harsh as I'd ever seen it, as if chiseled out of stone. I heard my own voice screech, felt my hands ball into fists that launched blows both physical and magical. None of that, though, stopped my man for an instant.

“Hang on, Kenna-lass,” he said, low and focused, and somehow I managed to hear him even while the bone walker screamed. “Just hang on!”

His arms wrapped around me. So did his magic—magic which, let me remind you, had gotten considerably stronger in the month I'd been gone. Imagine the force of a stiff right hook to your jaw. Now imagine that force, multiplied by the life energies of every single person in a city and all its suburbs besides. Christopher's Warder power, turned on me, felt exactly like that.

If I'd been the only one behind my eyes, his strike would have knocked me right into the ground. But with Melorite on the rampage through my nervous system, my hijacked power erupted in immediate defense despite the explosion of stars across my sight. I had just enough time to think
oh, that's how shields are supposed to work
before my hands shot up to hurl killing cold straight into Christopher's face. He staggered, not enough to let me go completely, but enough for his grip on me to loosen.

My body writhed, limbs and hands alike moving in patterns I only barely began to register as combat both physical and magical. The bone walker broke Christopher's hold and spun away from him, faster than I'd ever managed to move before.

That was when Millicent shot me.

Her power struck in the same instant, a lightning bolt to my brain, but that was nothing compared to the white-hot fire of a shotgun shell piercing my shoulder.

Melorite's presence across my consciousness buckled violently, narrowing my world to her shock and rage. Somewhere just beyond that, I realized in dread, was pain. But before it could steamroller over me completely, someone tackled me to the rain-sodden earth. I went down hard, vision blurring with washes of light and darkness, hearing shorting out beneath a roar of several voices shouting at once. My aunt, Jake, Carson and Jude all yelled their dismay. Millie shouted them down, every last one of them.