Revenant (16 page)

The single large room of the building seemed to float in light the color of tarnished silver. It appeared to be some kind of bizarre chapel built of skeletal remains. The room was cold and reeked of rot, the
weight of vile magic hanging in the air as a choking ivory fog. The walls and floor were covered in carved and painted bones, but the bones were not merely lying or stacked like cordwood; they were assembled into patterns and objects, as if in a gruesome parody of a church. Murals built of skeletal corpses seemed frozen in the midst of some action or another. Massive columns and candelabra of bones and skulls rose from the floor—even the altar and the cross above it were constructed from the bones of the dead. Perhaps a dozen narrow wooden boxes stood against the walls of the room, each no more than eighteen inches tall, wreathed in Grey mist and knotted spells, the polished surfaces reflecting strange illumination.

The light in the room seemed to come partially from the candelabra in which stood macabre tapers of fingers and bones only partially flensed of flesh and dipped in wax. The flesh and fat of the dead burned with a sickening stink and added to the strange silver glow. The floor was a mosaic of stars, crosses, and circles created in tiny bones that ranged from the palest cream, through every shade of brown, to flame-darkened gray and black, all set in white mortar and worn smooth over time. The rest of the uncanny light rose from the largest circle, beaming upward from the floor like cold footlights on a stage in hell.

At the center of the floor, where the shapes of cross, star, and circle overlapped, sat an old man dressed in black, his back to me as he levitated a few feet from the surface on a column of mist reflecting the silvery green light of the circle. His energy corona showed bone-white amid a storm of black and rising spikes of bloody red. I knew I’d seen it before, but I had no focus to spend on remembering where. The mist seemed to hold him in a bubble of moving light that passed through him and made a path from him to the altar and from his right to his left. My eyes followed the illumination.

To his left lay a pile of human bones and on his right sat a cage built of bone and silver metal that took on an oily, iridescent glow when viewed through the Grey. A little girl with black curls looked out through the cage bars. She lay flat with one arm sticking out of her prison as if pointing through the man to the pile of bones on his other side. Her hand lay palm up, exposing the pale, tender skin on the underside. Shallow parallel cuts ran from her elbow to her wrist, weeping blood onto the bone-covered floor. The light seemed to lap at her blood and carry it away in droplets of red that moved toward the floating man.

The little girl whimpered, watching me, then shifted her eyes away to the altar at the front of the room, along the moving path of light. I felt breathless as my own horror tangled with the reflection of Quinton’s rage and anxiety, twisting the paranormal connection between us. The girl must have been Soraia. I fought the desire to run to her, fearing that a wrong move would kill her. I wanted to scream in frustration and anger.

What was Quinton doing about it? I looked to my right, toward the movement I’d detected there when I entered. Quinton had crouched down to the floor in his covering of darkness just a few feet from another man who wore black robes and stood by the three-o’clock position of the circle, holding a large black candle burning in his hand. Both men were perfectly still, looking toward the altar. Quinton was poised for some action while the other man, oblivious to him, seemed mesmerized by the ceremony going on. Quinton glanced toward me as if he knew I was ready to leap, and shook his head with an angry grimace. He didn’t like it any better than I did. Carlos must have told him to wait for something, and we would do so, but I could feel his frustration mixing with my own.

At the front of the room, a tall, slim woman in a narrow black
dress and black high heels stood in front of the altar. Her blond hair was streaked with silvery gray, and the lines at the corners of her eyes said she had already seen fifty, but everything else said otherwise. She had picked up an ornate cup from the altar and held it in front of her while murmuring words that twined into the strange sound that occupied the room like another living being. A man, dressed just like the one at the edge of the circle, walked from the shadows and poured red liquid from a matching pitcher into the cup. The gold-colored lining of the cup turned black, and a dark vapor boiled over the rim, swirling into the air in an expanding spiral that wound toward the edges of the room.

As the dark mist touched the carved bones on the walls, they began to sing and wail, the smoke twisting through holes carved in the hollow shafts of arm and leg bones, around the curves of ribs, and through the gaping eye sockets of human skulls.

The woman said something that was drowned in the rising wail of the bone flutes. The greater volume of blood that ran from Soraia’s arm lifted from the floor and flowed swiftly now toward the floating man at the middle of the circle, following the path of light like water in a pipe. As it touched his outstretched right hand, the blood turned to mist that spread over his arm and side, vanishing in the black cloth. The spell moved through him as if he were some kind of conductor. Bones from the pile on his left rose into the air in the moving light, assembling themselves into a skeleton that gained the momentary shape of its former owner.

Sharp memories of death enveloped me in pain as the ghost seemed to fight and resist, spinning in the light, and was then crushed with a screech back into a bundle of white that tumbled across the room to fall into one of the polished wooden boxes on the right side of the circle. The man with the candle walked to the box,
closed the lid over the clattering bones, and fastened the latch. Then he murmured over it as he dripped the black wax over the latch until the metal was covered. He pressed a small object against the wax and the remains fell silent.

The song of the bones faded to what it had been before. I caught my breath at the same moment that the woman at the altar seemed to draw hers for the first time in minutes. Her shoulders slumped a little as if they’d been doing this all night. “Now the girl,” she said.

The man with the candle began to walk counterclockwise around the circle as if he were going to change sides. Quinton lunged forward, shedding his cloak of darkness, and wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders and head, then twisted, using his momentum to add power to the motion.

I didn’t hear the man’s neck break, but the shock of his death knocked me to the ground with a gasp and I fell across the edge of the illuminated circle. The woman screamed in rage. Quinton buckled to the floor with me, caught in the lashing pain by our paranormal connection.

The light from the circle’s edge seemed to burn through me for a moment before it flashed and vanished with a stink of burning hair. I struggled to regain my feet, just inside the circle this time, aching and breathing as raggedly as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I turned to lurch toward Soraia from my knees; however, as the one to break the circle, I was subject to the effect of the bone magic now that I was outside the cloak of Carlos’s protection. The presence of the ghastly bones with all their death hummed in the lingering cloud of power that the mage had raised. The strange magic seemed to stab at my own skeleton with hooked blades, slowing me and pulling me downward.

Carlos had darted across the broken circle, revealed from the
shadows, and was reaching for the floating man who was moving as though dazed in his bubble of light. The woman shouted some words and upended the cup on the altar, red liquid flowing in bloody rivulets over the white bones. She snatched the hand of her assistant and drove a knife through it, pinning him to the base of the cup as he screamed in shock. Blood ran down the cup and into the intricate carvings on the altar bones, burning them red.

The floating man plunged to the floor in a clatter of bones and an icy pall of mist enclosed him, seeming to bear him to the floor and hold him there. Carlos smashed his fist against the opaque white shape the steam and bones had taken. His hand rebounded as if the dome had hardened. He roared in anger and turned toward the woman as Quinton ran several steps ahead of me, heading for the cage that held his niece.

The woman spoke rapidly and made a flinging motion in Quinton’s direction. A whirling ivory chain of bone caught him around the legs and upper body, flipping him to the floor with a crash that shook dust from the columns of skulls nearby. He tried to ignore the spell and squirmed toward Soraia’s cage, but he could move only a few inches. He gasped, his face going pale, and he fought to move forward, the labor of his breathing mixing with his niece’s weak sobs and the panting of the man whose hand was transfixed by a dagger.

The woman made another gesture, as if lofting something into the air, and four of the bony figures from the walls began to detach and walk toward us. The first reached me in a moment and snatched for my head with its skeletal hands. I ducked, wincing, and swiped at it, yanking a bone loose from its lower leg and rolling aside. The bone melded to the floor as the walking skeleton fell over me. Its bones rattled against the mosaic of smaller bones, sticking and forming a partial cage around me. Kicking and yanking, I thrashed,
breaking the bones as I tried to get back to my feet. The next skeleton didn’t even try to grab me, but threw itself on top of the other, its bones sliding straight down like spears.

I yanked the edge of the Grey and tugged it over me like a shield, isolating myself in the folds as the bones pierced through, shoved aside by the Grey where they hadn’t yet encountered another bone. Then they sealed themselves to the floor or to other bones when they touched at last. The cage was tight and without the edge of the Grey over me, the plunging bones would have gone right through me. I had no desire to see what would happen if they had pushed through my flesh to my own bones. But the bones were brittle with age and I continued to kick and beat at them, making my way out.

The third skeleton crushed itself over Quinton as he crept toward Soraia’s prison, but Quinton rolled, knocking more of the bones aside than I had been able to. The scattered bones hit the floor and made a small obstacle. Quinton was still barely moving, squirming forward by inches, borne down by the spell that enclosed him. I fought to get back to my feet, but it felt like the floor was drawing my own bones down to it and rising was more difficult than it should have been.

The woman took a step away from the altar, satisfied that Quinton and I were no threat now. She picked up a small white object and left her minion still pinned without a single glance of concern. Her expression narrowed and she focused on Carlos, who stood just to the left of the room’s center in a rising shimmer of obsidian light that climbed up his body and wove around him like a dancing chorus of deadly vines. He seemed gigantic, enfolded in the shroud of his power, and the last of the bone constructs sparkled into dust as it touched him. Sparks snapped in the air around him as if he stood at
the eye of an electric storm. The woman seemed unfazed, though she did keep her distance from him.

“Well done, Maggie Griffin,” Carlos said. “You saved your master from my wrath. For now.”

She tried to restrain a wince at his knowledge of her name, but if I saw it, Carlos had, too. Instead of replying, she spread her arms and the room shook as the rest of the bony figures on the walls pulled themselves loose from the plaster and stepped onto the floor, animated and enraged. They turned toward Carlos and me, clicking as they began to walk toward us, ignoring Quinton and Soraia. I was barely up when the nearest skeleton swung its arms, clawing at me. I dropped and swept its feet out from under it, but I was sweating with the effort, pulling against the hungry grip of the floor.

The bones scattered, not sticking this time, but now other bone constructs were close enough to grab at me. As I tried to manage the increasing number of fragile assailants, the skeleton I’d just broken began drawing back together. I would have cursed, but I was already breathing too hard to want to waste my breath.

Griffin laughed. “Which of your friends will you save? You can’t possibly manage them both before the bones collect them.”

Carlos crouched on the floor, his hands rising, drawing black tendrils from the ground. Blood ran through the interstices of the bone mosaic, drawn toward him from the altar and from the place Soraia had bled onto the floor. Carlos slammed his palms onto the floor with the same gesture he’d used to frighten the dogs. The room shook and the skeletons shattered, bones tumbling to the ground.

Griffin narrowed her eyes and walked closer to me. I dodged to the side, running as best I could toward Quinton. A bone candelabrum tumbled to the ground, knocking me down and blocking the
direct route to my lover and his niece. I shot a glance over my shoulder. Griffin smirked at me and made a clawing, clutching gesture. The floor beneath me heaved, knocking over more of the reeking candelabra. I was enclosed in a ring of fire and burning bones. It wasn’t as much of a barrier to me as it would have been to some, but it looked intimidating and I could feel the floor reaching for me again, tiny ivory spurs cutting through my thin shoes and skin, reaching for my bones. I danced aside, coming perilously close to the flames. I snatched another cold edge of the Grey between myself and the grasping bones, but it meant bending down, which put my face uncomfortably close to them. I could hear the whispers of their song as my Grey shield cut through them.

Carlos rose back to his full height. “Your ideas could not begin to encompass what I can ‘manage.’” He made another gesture, a small thing limned in blackness. The bones of the altar bent, bristling and snatching at her.

Griffin darted forward, startled, as the bones grabbed hold of the man pinned to the altar. He screeched as they touched him and began to pierce his flesh. He yanked his hand back from the cup, dislodging the knife a little as he tried to escape.

The dome of bone around Griffin’s master shivered on the floor.