Heaven's Bones (41 page)

“Don't listen to him, Dirk,” said Artemis, his words sounding false and hollow in his own ears.

For the nameless man was right. They
had
turned Dirk away. They
had
called him darkling.

The nameless man reached out and placed his hand on Dirk's shoulder. Dirk closed his eyes.

“Come with me, nephew,” said the man. “Darklings belong together. Together we'll learn how to control the Mists. Together we'll lead this army of Angels, straight up to God's throne, to this heaven you people speak of and fear and desire and know so little.”

Dirk opened his eyes, lifting them to the man; they glittered with tears. He opened his mouth; Artemis knew his answer would be
yes
.

The bundle, lying forgotten almost at their feet, stirred and moaned. A scrap of cloth covering the face fell away, revealing a bloodless face.

It wasn't a child—it was a woman, tiny and undergrown. Her pale features were familiar, and Artemis realized with a shock she must be related to Dirk—and to him.

Dirk looked at her and his mouth snapped shut; he turned as if to go to her but stopped, as if an invisible physical force held him in place.

“Claire?” he managed, sounding incredulous.

“Dirk,” said the child-woman. “Brother, help me.”

Claire—his mother had mentioned her. Blasted, crippled out of the womb from Dirk's malevolence, or so he supposed.

Artemis tried to go to her, to help her, but some strange power gripped his limbs, holding them in place.

The man looked down at her in surprise.

“They didn't finish you off, I see,” he said. “Well, that's easily taken care of.”

And with a brutal ease that was breathtaking, he kneeled by the girl and broke her neck with a swift, efficient twist.

With superhuman effort, Artemis lurched forward a pace and was brought up short again. Dirk cried out in disbelief and horror, a primal cry that had little human in it, and raised the knife high.

The man rose and turned to Dirk, and Artemis found he was released. Swiftly he kneeled at the girl's side, feeling at her neck for a pulse. There was nothing.

Still kneeling, the Angel with the sewn-shut mouth reached out to her companion. As if knowing what she wanted, the other allowed her to take the tip of her knife-blade tail. Delicately, the Angel lifted the point to her face and severed, one by one, the threads holding her lips together.

She threw back her head and called out, a great howl of longing, of summoning, as if that cry had been bottled up inside behind her sewn mouth for ages.

Now silent, she lowered her head and looked at Sophie with her one eye. Scarlet drops oozed from the needle holes around her mouth. The baby was silent.

Sophie shifted her weight and tore away her petticoat, ripping it into strips. She wadded a pad of fabric against Cecelia's wound, both the entry and exit points, and bound it tightly, all under the disconcerting gaze of the Angels.

There was the flutter of wings overhead, and the soft thump of more of them landing. They had come at their sister's call. Sophie kept her hands and her mind on her work.

“Am I going to die, Sophie?” whispered Cecelia.

“I've seen worse, and treated worse. No, Cece. You're not going to die.”

Her patient glanced at the Angels, rank upon rank of them, gathering around them.

“They're going to kill us, though.”

“No, they're not,” said Sophie, between her teeth, as she tied off the last bandage.

“We must,” said the one-eyed Angel, the drops of blood like rubies on her lips, her voice hoarse with disuse and that tremendous cry. “Not you, because you are Margaret. But the rest …” She nodded at Cecelia, and the prone body of Alex. “And the villagers. Trueblood's orders, and Trueblood controls us. We would rather die, but we don't have the privilege.”

Sophie glanced around at the Angels. At the sight of her medallion, they all kneeled, an army of the damned—killing machines. She was torn between disgust and pity, pity at what had been done to them.

“You don't have to obey him,” she said, angrily.

“He animates us with the Mists,” the Angel replied, weeping. They all were weeping.

The Angel turned to her companion. “Finish it,” she said, and the other rose, her great weapon of a tail arched high, and moved toward Cecelia. Sophie stood between them.

“You'll have to kill me first,” she said.

A great sigh went up from the Angels.

“So be it,” said the Angel with the tail.

“No weapon can harm me,” said the man, almost gently, explaining the facts of life to children. “Because no weapon knows my name.”

Artemis, still kneeling beside Claire's cold body, spoke, and
knew
. “This weapon knows you.”

Incredulity, then scorn passed quickly over the man's face. And then his features froze.

Dirk held the knife, plunged to the hilt in the man's belly.

Tibor. His name is Tibor
. It was as if the knife, mated now with its
master, sung it out for all to hear.

Tibor stared down at Dirk, wide-eyed. Dirk pulled the knife up, slicing Tibor's abdomen open, just as Jaelle had done in a different time and place.

“I curse you, uncle,” spat Dirk Penhallow. Another voice seemed to speak with his, deeper, older. “Darkling, Dukkar. I cast you out.”

Something heavy and thick and gray spilled out from the widening slit in Tibor's belly.

Dirk drew breath to say more and stopped. Tibor had moved swiftly, and the handle of another blade, plain and unadorned but deadly enough for all that, protruded from Dirk's throat.

Dirk mouthed words that never came out, and Artemis watched in horror as he staggered away from Tibor, hands frantically scrabbling at his own neck.

Artemis managed to catch him as he fell. Dirk's body was heavy in his arms, and he staggered back and almost fell to the ground.

Tibor pawed at the elaborate handle of the knife, knocking it free of him. More misty grayness poured from him, gushing out as thick as blood, and the slash spread up to his chest and down to his groin and widened, splitting him further and further apart.

He looked in astonishment at his own sundering, helpless before the speed and power of it, and snapped his head up at Artemis, kneeling with Dirk clasped in his arms.

He shot them a look of venomous hatred, and opened his mouth and Artemis knew that Tibor Vadoma had the gift of cursing stronger than any male of his line ever had, and that its fury would fall on him and his cousin unabated. He held Dirk closer and braced himself.

Instead Tibor threw back his head and screamed, a cry not and never of this world: despair, hatred, pain, and longing were embodied in it. The fog thickened around him and met the substance
pouring from his mutilated body, his mouth opened wider than should be possible and the mist surged from it, jaw dislocated and hanging free.

Tibor Vadoma felt the Mists tearing him apart, the sensation horribly familiar, and he fought it with every fiber of his being, brought skill and experience and hard-won knowledge to bear on the simple problem of staying whole, in one world and not trapped between. But it was no use: within the Mists he heard a gentle chuckle—the voice of his old mentor of Grayhalme, so many ages ago. Within the swirling vapor he saw, just for an instant, the blind gaze of the bone man. And he knew, with a bitterness that eclipsed the pain of the knife in his belly or the surprise that Jaelle's Breed had bested him, that he was no master of the Mists, that they were and had been using him for their own inscrutable purposes, that he was a tool to be used and discarded, that they were mocking him even now
.

Fog met fog and he was suspended in it for an instant, writhing like a stuck frog, coming apart at the seams. Then the mist thinned away and he was gone.

Artemis kneeled with Dirk across his knees, staring at the place Tibor had been.

Dirk stirred weakly, unable to speak with the blade through his throat. Artemis considered pulling it out—would it make it worse?

Sophie would know.

“You did well, cousin,” said Artemis, rocking Dirk back and forth like a child. He couldn't think of anything else to do. Claire was dead, and Dirk dying in his arms, and so he rocked.

“You did well,” he said again.

Sophie braced herself for a blow that never came. The Angels were looking up at the sky, and something in the air changed, something passed through them with a visible quiver.

“He's gone,” said the Angel with the mutilated mouth. “Trueblood is gone. The Mists have taken him.”

Swiftly she dashed forward, wings furled, and grasped Sophie by the arm. Sophie was too startled to resist.

“Quick,” said the Angel. “Before he finds a way to come back—and he will, sooner or later. Quickly.”

“What?” said Sophie. At last she was truly afraid.

“Order us …” The Angel looked around at her fellows, and with one accord they nodded.

“We should never have existed. We are monstrous, and a monster controls us. Order us to destroy ourselves.”

“Destroy yourselves?”

“Before it's too late.”

“No,” Sophie snapped.

“You must.”

“I said no. There's been too much death here already.” She twisted out of the Angel's grip.

“Margaret—you don't understand. There will be more death, more destruction if Trueblood can control us again.”

“I don't destroy people; I heal them. At least, I try. All I've striven to become, all my work, becomes ashes if I become a killer. Can you understand that?”

The Angel threw back her head and cried out in despair, and Sophie had to struggle not to cover her ears against that piteous sound.

The Angel lowered her head and fixed Sophie with a burning gaze that was nearly physical.

“Margaret,” she hissed. “Sophia, what do you do with a cancer?”

She couldn't tear herself away from the creature's stare as she realized what it was asking.

“I cut it out,” she said slowly.

“Why?”

Sophie felt tears cold on her face. “Because if I do not, it will destroy the rest of the body.”

The Angel reached for her hand, gentle now, and Sophie didn't resist as she took it.

“We are a cancer, Sophia. When Trueblood controls us, when he makes us his weapons, his armies, we are a cancer in the body. He can use us to destroy the innocent, and he will.”

Her fingers were warm in Sophia's. “Because Robarts made us, because some of
him
is in us, we can obey you this once. Help us.”

“No,” said Sophie, but her voice was weak.

The Angel pulled her closer.

“Have you any idea what it's like to go mad? To be, entirely, subject to something outside yourself? To recover, however briefly, self-control?”

She shut her eyes, the scars across her left eyelid vivid white. “To feel oneself descending again into madness? Please. Don't let us become his tools again. Don't let him rape our spirits again.”