“Rush it,” Quinton said.
We all ran forward, separated by no more than an arm’s length. I could see the black tangle of energy that hung on whatever the thing was, moving upright like a man, but making no sound. At first, it seemed not to see us; then it turned and a stray beam of starlight fell across the gleam of white bone where a face should have been. I ran harder and was the first to crash into it, throwing my shoulder into the construct of bone and magic. It dug into me, remnant muscle holding bone together and allowing it to push back. I heard its teeth clack above my head.
“Go, go! I got this one!” I yelled, enveloped in the odor of its rot.
Neither of the men paused, but kept running forward as I fought with the animated skeleton. It had no remains of a soul or life, only the brittle black-and-white magic that held it together, and though it was fierce, it was fragile. I plunged my hand through the arch of its ribs and laid hold of the ice-cold core of the spell that bound it together.
The thing raked at me with its defleshed hands. I ducked my head, losing my grip on the frozen bit of magic that held the thing in form. It brought the memory of its weight with it, and I had to crouch and roll it over my hip as it lunged to grapple with me. It flipped over and hit the ground. I threw myself onto it and clutched through the gap of its ribs, ripping out the icy blackness that animated the thing. It subsided to the ground, parts falling aside as it reverted to death. I winced as the small shred of its demise passed through me like a narrow blade. Whatever had killed the person who used to own these bones, it had been recent, the remnant thread of its dying caught in the tangle of reanimation.
I scrambled to my feet in a moment and ran for the door through which Quinton and Carlos had already disappeared. I stepped into the room and stopped short, my ears filled with an eerie whispering and wailing that wound through a rising and falling chant, bringing a giddy nausea much like what I experienced near Carlos. The people in the room ignored my entrance, continuing with their strange work. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t seem to have seen me.
I looked around. The edges and corners of the room fell into shadow that was thickened by barbed coils of magic. All light came from the center of the room, but stopped abruptly at the edge of the black shroud of energy that seemed to creep like the nevoacria, slowly surrounding the people at the center. At first, the room was so dark outside the circle on my side that I couldn’t see. I tilted my vision toward the Grey and glimpsed Carlos moving around the edge of the room clockwise as Quinton prowled in the other direction beneath the mantle of shadow I was sure Carlos had conjured—it had the feel of his magic to it. Their advance was a slow agony when my own thoughts urged me to run forward, disrupt the scene by force, and take Soraia back immediately. But no matter how it galled, I knew there was a purpose in this careful progress. I crouched to take the moment’s measure. When my hands touched the ground, I felt the chill of death in the rounded shapes of bones rubbed smooth by time.
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.