I gaped at him, but I couldn’t see that he was in any way crippled or missing a significant bone—even though the flute was small, it wasn’t as small as a finger bone or one from the ear, and I couldn’t spot where it had come from.
His expression bloomed into delight as he saw me looking, as if my understanding was a thing of joy for him. “You’re clever. I found others to take their places. I have sacrificed for the work, but I couldn’t finish if I left my own body broken. Purlis believes he can control the drache by giving one bone, but I have given three—keys to the song. I hear the melodic complement in you—small, like a grace note—and I will take that for our dragon, too. Not a key, but it will be beautiful. No, no . . . It will be exultant. I will exult you. You will be perfected.”
He was enthralled with his idea and didn’t hear my muttered, “I’d rather remain flawed.”
He brought the macabre instrument to his mouth and blew, working his way through the tones, each seeming to flay me and touch my skeleton like live wires.
Dark shapes and ivory vapor oozed out of the pipe as he played a disturbing tune that made my spine ache. As the coil of magic wafted closer, the pang intensified and spread. It felt as if my skeleton were vibrating, every bone separately at high speed. The tormenting song rattled and hummed into my body, making me arch and writhe in pain as my joints seemed to be tearing themselves apart. One clear, piercing tone seemed to cut into the ring finger of my left hand like a physical blade, the bone shivering and ringing with the same note until the very fingertip was as cold as ice, singing back to the flute. It felt as if the farthest bone of that finger no longer belonged to me, although it was still attached.
The spell of Rui’s music wove through and wrapped me, crawling through my bones until it reached my stinging left hand, which shook and jerked without any impetus from me. Constrained so close to my side, the twitching hand fought to rise, falling back to pound the table and then fly upward again as the rest of my body drew tighter and tighter in a bow of anguish.
Rui pounced on my thrashing hand, dropping the flute to the floor. He yanked the restraints away and dragged me off the table, toward another part of his chamber. Released from the torment of the song, I went limp on the floor, falling into a heap. Without a glance at me, Rui dragged me forward by the wrist, far stronger than I’d anticipated of such a small man.
The bone flute rolled ahead of us toward a butcher block and Rui pulled me in its path. He heaved me up, yanking my hand onto the surface. I fell back down, too enervated to manage any resistance and too stubborn to contribute to whatever he had in mind.
“Stand up!” he snapped at me.
I shook my head and lay on the floor. “Too tired . . .”
He let out a growl of frustration and threw my hand down as he turned aside again, saying, “Selfish, useless creature.” He grabbed for something and I didn’t bother to look to see what it was. I snatched up the bone flute in my right hand, shoving it into the pocket of my dress, and dropped toward the Grey now that I was free—or nearly—of his hooks and strands of control.
“No!” he shouted, and I felt the bone-web prison try to close on me again as it had at the zoo, but he could not force me to the ground. I could feel the peculiar cold in the tip of my left ring finger, and before he could crush me or catch me by that resonance, I pushed back up to the normal, rising to my feet. I mustered all the strength I had left to stand and pick up the knife that lay on the block. Rui was too far away for me to use it on him, so I slammed the blade down on the farthest joint of my left ring finger. The tip of my finger fell off the edge of the butcher block in a spurt of blood and the drawing, tingling cold of Rui’s last connection vanished.
I threw myself into the Grey and rolled into the temporacline I’d been watching, dropping away from Rui’s chamber of horrors, free for the cost of my fingertip.
TWENTY-SIX
I had exchanged one type of paranormal cold for another and spent more of my own blood. I was free of Rui—at least until he wanted to try to track me by the song of my bones again—though I wasn’t sure how well that would work now that he no longer had his flute or a resonant connection to me. I had the impression he’d have to be pretty close to listen for me in the song of Portugal’s Grid, so the farther I got from him, the better my chances. I could have put an end to his tracking option by breaking a few of my bones, I supposed, but I was damaged enough as it was and now I was also bleeding from an amateur amputation. While I do heal preternaturally fast, I didn’t think that was going to save me today.
But without Rui’s traps and connections, I could drop deeper into the Grey and look for energetic signs that might get me closer to Quinton and Carlos faster. I couldn’t travel far or for long in the Grey even at the best of times—it was chilling, exhausting, and dangerous—and right now I was vulnerable. I needed to get back to the comparatively safe world of the normal—safe, that is, once I was far enough away from Rui.
Tired, shaking, and worried about what might come after me next, I crawled through the temporacline, swarmed by ghosts, until I seemed to be outside the current building. Then I slipped out of the frozen blade of time and dropped deeper into the Grey, awash in a silver fog of nascent souls and shrieking phantoms following the trail of my blood. I’d never bled in the Grey before and I hadn’t been sure that every hungry thing within it would come drooling after me like a pack of hunting dogs. I probably should have guessed, though. I needed to get out again, quickly, before anything nastier than a few ghosts caught up to me.
I could see the wild tangles of energy that were humans and mages rushing around on my right and the sweep of distant darkness that was probably the river. It was too far for me to reach. I looked in another direction—northeast, I thought. And there, like a ridiculous beacon, was a blazing pink line that led to a frantic coil of brilliant blue shot with arcs of orange and red. I couldn’t think of anyone else in all of Portugal to whom I would have a pink familial connection aside from Quinton. I fixed the shape in my sights and moved toward it as fast as I could, rising from the Grey and dragging a train of bleeding, biting specters as I went.
I tumbled out in a cold rush of blood-gorged ghosts, into the falling dusk at the edge of a thick planting of trees. Quinton had been crouching in the undergrowth and turned to look for the source of the whimpering sound I made as I hit the ground and felt the normal world jar my aching, abused bones and joints. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was enough. His expression was grim as he prepared to do any violence necessary to get to me . . . and there I was without his having to manage any at all.
Quinton threw himself forward, scooping me to his chest as we both sprawled on the ground. “Harper. Harper,” he kept saying, kissing my face as if he hadn’t seen me in years. “I thought they were killing you. I felt—horrible things. Dear God, are you all right?”
“No,” I whispered. My voice was still a wreck. I held up my bleeding hand. “Lost a finger, screamed myself hoarse.”
Quinton grabbed my hand and wrapped something around the end of my chopped-short finger—some cloth that he tightened into a makeshift tourniquet with a pen and a piece of duct tape from his pockets.
“I felt that. The finger. Who did it? Rui? My father?”
“I did.”
He stared at me, confused and a little freaked-out. “Why?”
“Long story. Get me out of here. Please.”
I barely managed to keep on my own bare feet and not need to be carried away. Quinton led me down a hillside and out to the edge of a road where a tiny car was parked. It barely had room inside for two adults and a box of chocolate, but since we had no chocolate, we fit.