Quinton shivered. “That’s really disturbing.” He bumped the box with the edge of his hand, and most of the bones slid across the slick surface of the scarf, scattering again into the depths of the junk. The skull lodged in a corner and directed its empty eye sockets at us, as if waiting for another pat or a treat. Probably a finger.
I felt a touch queasy reaching into the box past that bony remnant. I half expected the thing of bones and mist to knit back together and attack me. But it didn’t. I lifted the skull and scarf out with care and settled it on the dashboard in the sun with a few of the bones. As I dug through the container, I found more bones and put them onto the scarf with the rest. Don’t ask why; it just seemed the right thing to do. I added some teeth as I found them, too. More than enough bits to make a cat and a half at the very least, though the teeth clearly hadn’t come from anything as small as a domestic house cat. Meat eater? Yes. House cat? Not on your life.
“You’re giving me the creeps, which I do not say lightly,” Quinton commented, watching me.
“Why? What’s so creepy? It’s just a bunch of bones.”
“It doesn’t seem that way when you touch them. And did you notice you’ve laid them out in a skeleton? Kind of a freaky one, but, still ...”
I looked at the pile and saw he was right. “Ah. I don’t know. It just . . . seemed the right thing to do.”
He peered at me. “That’s an odd thing to say. How do you get that impression? I mean you don’t usually do that sort of thing.”
I caught an annoyed sigh—I wasn’t put out with Quinton, but something was digging at me, and that scratched at my short temper. “Wygan said he was going to give me knowledge and ever since it seems like there’s something lurking, just at the edge of my understanding it. Like a shadow at the corner of a building, but I can’t see what’s making it. I have an urge to make order out of things. I keep thinking I can figure out what it is if I just clear away everything it isn’t. Does that make sense?”
“Mostly. But can you stop with the bones? There really is something . . . unsettling about that thing.”
I looked at it again, tilting my head to a better angle on the Grey without slipping in. The two-headed cat hissed at me from its disparate mouths. “Ugh,” I coughed, sweeping the bones into a single pile and shuddering as I touched them. “All right. No more skeletons right now.” I turned back to the box, more mindful of what I touched and how I laid it aside after that.
The carton yielded up a small trove of broken or orphaned jewelry—including a single garnet earring with an aura of outright malevolence clinging to it—a scatter of antique tarot and playing cards that didn’t make up a full deck of either, a few small cloth bags of plant matter that had dried to unidentifiable dust long ago, keys singly and in bunches, a stained leather glove so old and dry it had cracked across the knuckles, three knives of various materials and types, a tiny silver mirror in a carved mother-of-pearl frame, broken sticks of colored chalk, various candle stumps, a book no larger than my palm that had rotted into a lump and crumbled at the edges, and a leather bag containing a few old gold and silver coins whose origin I couldn’t guess from the misshapen portraits on the front.
“Any bells going off?” Quinton asked, watching me.
I slumped a bit, disappointed. “No. The bones, the knives, and that earring are the only things sending off anything I can pick out from the general clutter of Grey coming off this box in the first place. This stuff ’s been sitting around, going quiet or mixing with the rest for a long time. If it were just one or two objects, or if they’d been isolated from one another, the auras would be stronger. I could tell more about them. But this is like . . . soup. It’s been cooking together so long it’s hard to figure out which flavor came from what ingredient.”
“But it’s all got some magic remnant?”
“Seems that way.”
“So maybe it’s a box of tools and supplies for some kind of magic. Maybe someone cleaned them off before they packed them up originally.”
“They’re all dirty now.” I paused to think. “But someone might have tossed something else in the box, later, that infected the rest....”
I began picking up each item and trying to feel or scry some information from them.
Quinton put his hand on my arm. “That’s going to take a while. What can we eliminate? Anything too old or rotten to have been added late is probably not the thing you’re after. What was on top the first time you saw the box?”
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure a picture in my mind. The insistent muttering of the grid complicated the process, intruding as static yelps and stutters as I concentrated on remembering the box as it lay in its vault below London. “Shut up,” I muttered, pushing the sounds aside with a will and dredged the memory into my mind’s view. “Umm . . . the scarf. The garnet earring. A couple of teeth. A knife. The scarf covered everything below it and those few items were on top of the scarf.”
“Start with those. The scarf seems to be the dividing layer. Whoever packed the box may have used it to protect the lower contents.”
“So what’s on top is most likely to have been added later,” I finished for him. We didn’t think alike—his different perspective was one of the many invaluable things about Quinton—but we did understand each other’s way of thinking. It circumvented a lot of confusion and argument. When we didn’t want to argue, that is; we didn’t agree on everything, after all. Who does?
I did not wish to pick up the earring. I’d touched it once already and that had been unpleasant, but concentrating on it sounded like a bad idea. I put it aside for last and began with the teeth, picking them out from the pile of bones and disturbing as little else as possible.
They weren’t human teeth, so at least I wouldn’t fall prey to whatever intelligent horror might have held the creature when it died. I curled the half-dozen bits of rough ivory and enamel in my fist and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to settle my noisy mind before attempting to “read” them. I opened my eyes and my hand again and stared at the hard white objects.
There were five of them and they shone in each of the primary colors, plus one blue-green and one pink. Not black as I’d half expected. I didn’t know for certain what the colors represented, but they didn’t seem sick or warped. They didn’t send off much feeling either, at least not as a collection. If I separated them and concentrated on just one at a time, they sent out varying sensations of chill or warmth, sharp tingles or smooth hums, but that was all. Someday I was going to have to make a better study of the colors I saw in the Grey and figure out what they meant. I guessed most of the time based on how I felt or on other clues, but that was the best I could do.
I put the teeth back down.
Quinton raised his eyebrows. “Nothing?”
“Nothing interesting. I think they’re some kind of elemental icons. You know: earth, air, fire, water ...”
“That’s only four.”
“Yeah. Well. They could be emotional icons instead. That pink one, that’s . . . love.” I felt a little nervous saying it. I’m not a romantic, moony person and I’ve never looked good in pink. “But I’m not sure. They aren’t giving off much. No clues. Let’s try something else.”
Quinton started to reach for the earring. I pushed his hand aside.
“Not that. Not yet. Hand me the knives.”
“Which one do you want first?”
My eye fell on the one with a missing tip. I recognized the odd shape of it from the first time I’d looked into the box, like a long leaf with a dark channel down the middle, and it was made of a curiously dull and heavy metal or some cold, homogenous stone that shone with a frigid darkness. The handle was wrapped in stained leather, bound on with gold wire. “That one—with the broken tip.”