Carlos winced but didn’t move otherwise. I felt a stab of hysteria as well as pain through the joined finger and up my arm.
“Don’t twist,” he warned. “The joint isn’t meant for that.”
Quinton stepped out of the kitchen door, looking puzzled as he walked toward us. “What’s up? You guys look spooked.”
“I misspoke about there being nothing between us,” Carlos said.
Quinton glanced at our oddly joined hands and blinked, then stared. “What the hell is that?”
“The ghost bone. It appears this is my gift to Blaine in exchange for my life. I haven’t seen the phenomenon in a considerable time. I had thought it died out.”
“Apparently, not so much. And it hurts,” I said, holding still at the expense of growing discomfort in my forearm and hand from extraordinary pressure on the conjoined digit. The rest of my finger was below Carlos’s hand and I couldn’t see it, though I was sure it was still there from the tingling ache. “Is the rest of my finger still attached? I can feel it, but . . .”
Quinton ducked his head to see. “Well . . . it’s there. What it’s attached to is in question, since it looks like it’s just growing out of the middle of Carlos’s knuckle on each side.”
I curled the finger, causing Carlos to take a sharp breath and close his eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s wiggling, so if you’re doing the bending, it’s still your finger, babe.”
“I’m not sure how much of a relief that is.”
“It is better than the alternative,” Carlos said. “Perhaps we can reverse this action.”
“Worth a try,” I said, lowering and rotating my hand back to the position where my fingers had aligned with his. I could feel each finger brushing past his and back into position. The conjoined knuckle hesitated and balked like a tumbler in a rusted lock. I let out a little whimper and squeezed my eyes shut for a couple of seconds. The agony in my hand and arm was less, but the intensity of the ache in the finger was profound and after losing blood the night before, I felt a bit more weak in the knees than I wanted to admit.
Carlos scowled at our still-joined hands. “Hmm . . .”
I peered through the Grey at the knuckle. The bones looked like glass pipes filled with steam and outlined in white light. Thin red filaments of energy stretched along the bones and tangled at the joint, creating a mess I couldn’t make sense of. I leaned closer to the knot and slid a bit more into the Grey. The joint became less solid as I became less corporeal and the tight wires of red energy loosened, uncoiling slightly. I could see how the two bones of his hand and mine had—impossibly—slipped past each other and rotated just a little, locking the rounded ends together in the complexity of the joint. I twitched my hand a touch counterclockwise and arched the finger. . . . With a pop and a spark of discomfort, the bones slid free and our hands separated.
“Ow!” I yelped, jerking all the way back into the normal world.
I clasped the aching fingers in my other hand and looked up to see Carlos doing the same, cradling his right hand in his left. His eyes were still closed and he wore a thoughtful expression. “I see . . .” he muttered.
“What?”
He didn’t seem to hear me. He just said, “This could prove useful.” Then he opened his eyes and turned to the house. “We had best go back into Rafa’s memory of the house before anyone we would prefer not to talk to takes an interest.”
Inside, we walked up to the tower, having agreed that privacy was necessary for what we were going to discuss even in Rafa’s version of the house. Carlos opened the heavy curtains over the windows and pushed the casements wide, reveling in the touch of sunlight. A hushed flurry of minute rustlings and shuffling sounds rose at the intrusion of the light, and died away again, leaving an odor of newly turned earth and cut grass behind.
The chamber was cleaner than the last time I’d seen it, which surprised me at first, since I had expected the remains of whatever conjuring had drawn Carlos to Carmo to still linger in place. When had there been any time to straighten up? But the nevoacria—the shadow creatures that Carlos had drawn forth—had consumed and hidden away all traces of dust and disorder. Even the cobwebs and dry-rotted wood beside the fireplace were gone. Of the creatures themselves, there was only the smallest trace—persistent shadows in corners and under objects that cringed from sunlight and smoked when it touched them.
Carlos leaned against the edge of a table near the front window, so Quinton and I took the seats we’d occupied the last time, on the bench in front of a nearby table. The breeze through the window was pleasant, but the perfume of the garden had been muted by the odor of hot dust and old buildings.
“What about this ghost-bone thing?” I asked.
His expression was grave and remote. “We have little time for details. You will have to accept what I tell you without much explanation.”
“All right. Give me the short version.”
“It is a rare phenomenon—an affinity, not spell work. It’s related to but not the same as the bone magic you saw two nights ago. You noted then, I’m sure, that bones have resonance. If the practitioner can match the resonance and an appropriate bone is available, the bones can be exchanged or grafted to a degree. They do not have to touch or lie atop each other as ours did, but in this case, it appears the position completed the requirements. One of the bones of your hand and one of mine share the same resonance—as unlikely as it seems.”
“It doesn’t seem very useful to me,” I said.
“It is limited. True bone magic is more complex and broader in scope, but it requires tuning or reshaping the bones—utilizing them as the material and instruments of the spell work—as well as the ability to match resonance and draw a bone, living, from the body. This phenomenon is more use in healing bones—that was my mother’s skill.”
“I’m not sure I’m getting it,” I said.
“She would heal people of broken or diseased bones by grafting a small portion of her own bones to theirs through this ghost bone. Like you, she healed very quickly and barely noticed the loss of her bone matter most of the time. If the injury was severe enough, she would replace the bone with her own and bear the injury herself for a while. It was not pleasant to observe and I learned a great deal about pain, damage, and death by her side.” He saw me frown. “Not all of her experiments were successful and some of those she would have helped were too greatly injured to live. Some didn’t deserve her attention—I took them.”
I shuddered and felt the same reaction in Quinton, beside me. “How did this happen? Today, I mean—I think I know all I really want to about your relationship with your mother.”
Carlos chuckled. “In our case, it was simply luck. The hands of men and women are usually so unequally sized that one bone or another would have to be carved or reshaped—usually in the body. Grafted bones must be of the same status—living or dead. A dead bone doesn’t quicken in the body. But in our hands, there is something similar enough that the bones slipped past each other for a moment.”
“Because I’m tall and have large hands for a woman.”
“Paws,” Quinton added.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Now Carlos didn’t smile. “Regardless, tuning and assembling the correct bones—living and dead—weaving the appropriate spell through them, and binding them by power and sound are the processes of the Kostní Mágové. Theirs is a learned craft and the discipline doesn’t require that the practitioner have the ghost-bone affinity. It was not one I seemed to possess, but it appears that I’ve passed my mother’s latent ability on to you, temporarily, in exchange for what you’ve given me.”
“I’m not sure that there’s any . . . use for this ability, if I do have it. I mean, how would you even know you had the right bone to swap?”
“Practice and tuning. You should be able to hear the bones, if you have the skill.”