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.
Carlos smiled.
Griffin spun around, snatched the pitcher from the altar, and bashed it against her minion’s head with killing force, splattering the walls with crimson liquid that stank of sour wine and curdled blood. His skull smashed against the bristling altar and I was on my knees, choking and gasping as his death hit me. She never noticed, her attention focused on the bone shield at the center of the room.
Carlos made another small gesture, empowered by the presence of death as much as I was debilitated by it. The dome around Griffin’s master cracked and shivered.
Griffin put her hand on the bloodied skull of her dying companion and lifted a piece of it away, holding it tight enough to crush in her fist as she muttered under her breath. Hard shafts of white energy bolted upward and then plunged to the floor. For a moment, a black pit yawned around the dome of white in the center of the room, and the bone chapel shook, causing loose finger bones, skulls, and ribs to drop from the ceiling and fall into the hole until the blackness vanished again. Griffin smiled, an unpleasant, cold expression.
She turned and, as the man beside her died, she shoved the knife back down through his hand, repinning the spell to the cup and altar, and the white dome hardened again. But the floor had ceased to grasp for me and, with his passing, the man’s death no longer held me down.
“You are remarkably loyal in spite of your other flaws,” Carlos said, drawing Griffin’s attention back to him as I rolled through the spreading ring of fire and crawled to Quinton and Soraia.
“But this is a waste of effort. You cannot stand against me. Release the girl and I will not dine upon your soul tonight.”
“You really are sure of yourself, aren’t you, Mysterious Stranger?” Griffin replied, but her bravado was a sham, her voice rough as the coruscation of power around her fluttered. She’d burned through a lot of energy, but she wasn’t backing down.
Carlos laughed at her. “You already see that I can send you forth ‘to shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever. . . .’” Carlos pulled the broken crystal pendant from his pocket and held it up in the strange light of the room. “Even your master, swaddled in his shroud of bones, isn’t safe from me.”
Griffin twitched. “You threaten us with that?” she said, faking a laugh as she pointed at the pendant, moving her other hand to the side and out of his view. “It’s broken. You know that you’ll never get that little girl out of there without my say-so—which I won’t give if you harm him. And if you kill me, she’ll remain locked in that cage forever with your friends dead beside her, just more bones for our temple.”
There wasn’t going to be much of a temple left, I thought, as the flames continued spreading.
THIRTEEN
I reached Quinton and Soraia as a coil of white mist rose from the bones behind Carlos and the crystal began to sway in his grip. The mist started solidifying into a shape that seemed disturbingly familiar, like a small beast with scales and wings and a mouth full of vicious fangs. The blood and blackness of Carlos’s own power touched and wove into the shape as it came together faster, fleshing the skeleton of the Night Dragon. The silver chain of the pendant began to smoke.
Carlos dropped the crystal as the spectral dragon swooped.
Griffin laughed and sprang forward, more confident in spite of her flagging power. She’d obviously been working all night and, in spite of the venue, she was running out of steam. But she was laughing and it filled me with dread.
Carlos stepped aside, turning, and swiped through the dragon with a gleam of blackness as he crushed the crystal underfoot. I wound my hands into the white mass of Griffin’s spell that held Quinton to the floor and felt for the cold particle that held it in shape. My fingers burned as if I’d touched dry ice and I closed my aching hand around the linchpin of misery, removing it with a long, smooth pull. The spell crumbled into white dust around us and Quinton sucked in a lungful of air tainted with the increasing stench of burning flesh and bone.
As Quinton caught his breath, the nightmare thing that Griffin had unleashed wove through the air, but the blackness Carlos wielded cut its wing and it crashed to the ground, the bones—not pale green like the ones I’d seen before, but black and smoking—rebounding off the floor like hailstones as its borrowed darkness swarmed back to Carlos.
One of the wooden boxes burst into flame and the bones around the room began howling and singing as the heat and smoke rose. The box burned like a fuse and then collapsed. A screaming phantom shot up from the ruined box, arcing toward the ceiling to vanish through the roof. I could hear the distant chime and rattle of scales over silvery bones and feel the cold sweep of the Guardian Beast nearby, collecting the escaped revenant.
Griffin let out a moan, twisting and bending where she stood as if the broken illusions bore her down with them. The threads that linked her to the fallen Night Dragon dragged her to the floor, her burned energy weighing on her now. She raised her arms, and a fragile scaffold of bones arched over her.
I looked at Carlos, who had stooped to sweep up the rods of rutile that had scattered from the crushed crystal. He did not pause to see what had become of us, but gathered to him the fleeing darkness of the Night Dragon and its lines of control that connected it to Griffin, drawing the black shards of enchanted crystal into the baleful energy as if he were spinning yarn. The strand of his spell lengthened in his fingers, writhing around his hands like a snake looking for a place to strike. He caught it and wove it between his fingers like a cat’s cradle, twisting it as he murmured into the void between the filaments of death.
He pulled the intricate weave tighter, and Griffin crumpled with a strangled scream, her shield of bones collapsing and dissolving into the floor. The last of the uncanny light winked out, leaving only the stinking reek of the spreading fire from the fallen bone candles and the bleak glow of Carlos’s power to illuminate the room.
Carlos strode to the altar and yanked the knife from the dead man’s hand. The corpse slumped to the floor in a spill of blood and brains. The white dome at the center of the room dissolved, but of the man who had occupied it there was no sign—only broken bones and dust that fell away into a hole in the floor where the dark void had been. Growling, Carlos returned to stand over Griffin, the trailing pearls of death and darkness thinning and disappearing behind him. “Release the girl and I will let you live. Today. Otherwise . . .” he added, and pulled harder on the filaments woven between his hands so the shape thinned and strained.