Bones and Heart (2 page)

—blood was trickling from his nose. Such symptoms were always a warning of
their
presence.

He emerged before the stairs. The girl was gone.

But something stood behind him.

He lurched away from it, tearing through the wilderness that clotted the stairs. When he reached the doors of the abandoned house, he whirled, fumbling in his coat pocket for the silver dagger.

He dropped it.

He lifted his gaze to the figure in red standing before him. Its bisque face wasn’t a mask—the bisque
was
its face, the glass eyes deep-set and aware. A crack in one cheekbone revealed a wet darkness, as if it were filled with old gore. It had no scent. And it was so still—how had it moved without his seeing it do so? His stomach heaved. He pressed back against the doors.

“Move,” he whispered. “Why don’t you
move
?”

He lurched for the dagger he’d dropped.

The doll moved, and he stared in shock at the jointed hand clamped around his wrist. Shuddering, he met its glass gaze.

“Don’t,” he whispered, because he didn’t want to die. “Please don’t . . .”

When he saw the pewter pocket watch hanging on a chain around its neck, he snatched at it. The chain snapped. The living doll didn’t move. It didn’t release him. He sank back against the door, closed his eyes.

The creature slammed him against the door. Then it was gone. Jack, stunned, caught a flicker of red in the tangled greenery.

Evening had fallen by then. The abandoned mansion behind him began to stir.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Phouka sat across from Jack in a New Orleans tearoom called Leone Solaris. Her fashion sense wavered between ’70s rocker chick and Dickensian waif, and, tonight, she wore a little dress of crepe-brown silk. With her auburn hair in waves past her shoulders, she appeared deceptively mortal.

“I can’t taste anything.” Jack examined an ornate pastry. “Is the tiara necessary?”

She primly adjusted the delicate diamond crown on her head. “This is an expensive place. It’s owned by one of ours. You couldn’t have dressed up?”

“I don’t do tuxes.” He set his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Did she tell you we’d be picking up Grindylow?”

“You think I’d have come if she had?” Phouka selected a beignet and looked around. “I love places like this. They’re so civilized.”

“I’m not driving back to New York with three goddamn Grindylow in a rental car. We rode the shadow here. We’re riding it back.”

“They can ride the shadow too. I know how to bind them to us.”

Jack sat back. “How are they made?”

“You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

“Alchemy. Necromancy. Shall I go into detail?”

“Never mind.” He wished he hadn’t asked. He set down his cup of tea so that it wouldn’t shatter in his tightening grip. “And how long has Mr. Bones been creating his horrors?”

“Ever since he and a queen of air and darkness hooked up. He built them. She animated them. I believe that was somewhere in Babylon. I know he’s Etruscan.”

“So.” Jack lowered his gaze through his eyelashes. “A long time then.”

Jack stood outside the gates of the abandoned London mansion that had, in minutes, transformed into a splendid estate. The occasional passerby didn’t even glance at it as the glamour pooled up the mansion’s stairs, over the walls, staining
everything with newness. The windows glowed with lamps. Music drifted on the mist-webbed air.

Someone called his name from within the fog drifting along the gas-lit street. Jack glimpsed a crimson coat. Reluctantly turning his back on the fairy mansion, he strode toward whatever had called to him, gripping the silver dagger in his coat pocket.

The hooded figure in crimson fled. He loped after it.

When he saw it again, it stood on the balcony of the upscale town house where his father had exorcised the nasty spirit from the blond girl. As he looked up at the living doll, it turned and disappeared through the French doors.

Jack grabbed a drainpipe and began climbing, a trick he’d learned from a friend who’d been a chimney sweep. He clambered over the railing. The French doors were ajar and he stepped cautiously through.

He saw red . . . red everywhere, over the walls, the floor, the bed. . . . He wanted to be sick, but couldn’t—the life-size doll was crouched beside the blond girl and it held . . . it held . . .

The heart torn from the girl’s chest pulsed once, strands of blood pooling from it, onto the floor near the doll’s crimson skirt.

He yanked out the dagger and launched himself at the doll. It glided up and went for him, the lower half of its face unhinging to reveal a mouthful of teeth. He slammed the dagger into its left eye, shattering half the face, revealing a skull beneath.

Something struck the back of his head. He fell to his hands and knees. As he sank down toward the floor, a pair of booted feet moved into his line of sight. A silhouette with pale hair crouched before him. It said, in the exact same voice that Jack’s father had exorcised from the blond girl, “Good try, boy. Very brave. Just how she likes ’em.”

Jack’s world went dark.

Without Phouka, Jack slunk into the humid New Orleans night and found his way back to the secret, overgrown street in the French Quarter.

After over a century, he knew the habits to which the Fatas adhered like clockwork.
When the timepiece in his pocket clicked midnight, the doors to Lacroix’s house opened and the Fata emerged in his human guise. A silver Rolls-Royce pulled up to the curb and Lacroix got in.

As the car drove away, Jack tugged on a pair of leather gloves. There would be sentinels in Lacroix’s lair. He grinned in anticipation.

Rarely did anyone expect a thief to come through the front door, so he picked the lock and stepped into the crimson foyer. The eyes of the taxidermy crocs gleamed. Something giggled and scampered at the hall’s end. Although Jack could see in the dark, he palmed a flashlight and switched it on because electric light made reality clearer. As he passed the onyx mirror, he glimpsed something swimming up out of its depths, but he knew better than to look.

The first sentinel—a pillar that morphed into a hoof-footed girl—turned its wooden head to regard him with blank eyes. As its clawed hands reached for him, Jack slammed a silver knife into its breast. The sentinel once again became a thing of wood.

In the center of the round salon, he took from around his neck a bronze pendant shaped like a fly. He snapped the pendant from the chain, whispered to it. The bronze fly clicked to false life and glided into the darkness of the house. He followed it up a curving flight of stairs. The second sentinel—the shadow thing in a child’s nightgown—ran at him out of the dark, revealing a grotesque face with too many teeth.

Jack waited until it was close enough, then pulled two silver needles from his knotted hair and stabbed them into the sentinel’s chest. It snarled, biting at him. He pinned it, kicking, to the wall.

The bronze fly was crawling through the keyhole of a black metal door. If Jack had had a heart, it would have been battering at his rib cage.

A whisper behind him made him spin around as he snapped out a fan of mirrors in his left hand.

The Grindylow bride in its veil and white satin gown confronted its reflection in the mirror fan and stood completely still. Jack backed away, pushed open the metal door, stepped in, and locked it between him and the bride.

He turned to face a laboratory beneath fluorescent lighting—low doses of electricity were fine in Fata lairs, something they could produce by flickering in and out of reality. The walls were crisscrossed with shelves of jewel-hued bottles
filled with glowing orbs, sealed with wax and sigils. There were two tables. Lain upon each was a life-size doll, ball-jointed, vulnerable, and grotesquely beautiful.

Slouched in one corner, like a discarded toy in a red gown mottled with age, was an antique Grindylow, half of its bisque face caved in to reveal the yellowed skull beneath.

Lacroix had kept her, all these years.

Jack awoke in the dark with a dead girl on the floor beside him. The pale-haired shadow and the horrifying doll-thing had vanished. He heard only the whisper of mice in the walls, the staccato drum of a horse’s hooves on the street below the balcony.

He scrambled up and stifled a cry as he set one hand in sticky liquid. He could smell it, the blood. Nausea crippled him for a few staggering seconds.

He pushed out onto the balcony. He almost fell on the climb down, but dragged himself to his feet. As he ran in the direction of the inn and his father, dizziness from his head injury made him reel. The world of night and fog became a blur.
No. Don’t let me fall.

A strong arm slid around him, kept him upright. A young man’s voice said, “Tell me where you want to go.”

The stranger slung one of Jack’s arms over his shoulders and guided him the three blocks to the Black Lamb Inn. Despite the fog, Jack glimpsed his rescuer’s tangled brown hair and a face that might have come from a Renaissance painting.

“I’m Jack.” Jack bit down on his lip, fighting another urge to be sick.

“That’s your true name?
God.
No wonder they thought it was amusing. You need to leave London, Jack. They’ve noticed you.”

“
They.
Demons . . .” Jack spat. “Fairies.”

“Some might use those words—if they want a bad end.”

“Are you one of them?”

The young man met Jack’s gaze. His brown eyes had the preternatural silver of a dead thing’s. “I am now.”

Then Jack was alone, standing before the inn. As he sagged against the door, he drew from his coat the pocket watch he’d torn from around the doll horror’s neck and ran his thumb across the name engraved into the pewter.

In Lacroix’s house, Jack squatted down before the antique Grindylow in the red gown. He cupped its broken face in his hands. He felt a pain in his chest. The scratch on his cheek began to seep blood—he could scent its iron tang.

“Your name”—his voice was a scrape as he gazed into the doll’s remaining glass eye—“is Moira Hawthorn. You were wed to Nikolai Harrow. You had a son named . . .”

He closed his eyes. The new growth inside his chest, amid the alchemical roses, pained him as the doll’s jointed fingers closed around his.

He pressed his brow against the bisque skull and pushed the silver dagger he’d brought into the place where the heart would be. There was a sound like glass breaking. The Grindylow’s mouth opened and it breathed out. There was a pulsing light behind the glass eye. All the orbs in the bottles grew brighter, their light casting a harlequin glow against Jack’s skin.

She was free. He smiled.

When something tore across his back, he rolled away. He flung his mirror fan at the Grindylow bride that had crept up behind him. The fan razored diagonally into the porcelain face so that the Grindylow was forced to gaze at half of its reflection. Until the mirror was removed, the doll would remain frozen.

Lacroix stepped from behind the bride. He peered down at the Grindylow in the red gown. “Well, that’s a shame. She lasted longer than the others.”

Jack slid to his feet, holding two more daggers he’d pulled from his arsenal. He walked toward Mr. Bones.

“You cannot kill me.” Lacroix smiled. “Reiko Fata needs me.”

Jack smiled back. “That’s exactly why I’m going to kill you.”

Jack stepped into the room he shared with his father and found it empty of Nikolai Hawthorn’s belongings, although his own remained. Clutching the pocket watch, he sank against the door. His guts churned.

He discovered a letter written in his father’s hand folded upon his violin. His da had left him. It had become too dangerous—powerful entities had noticed their activities and they knew Nikolai Harrow Hawthorn’s name. He had left to lure them away. Jack was to travel to Old Church Street in Dublin, where a family friend would meet him and give him a job and a room. There was also an envelope of money, but Jack flung that at the wall. He locked the door and curled on the bed, his boots dirtying the sheets as he cradled the pocket watch he’d snatched from the killing doll.

He woke to the plaintive sound of a violin.

In the moonlight pooling through the room, the black-haired girl he’d rescued from the spider spirit sat on the other bed, legs crossed, his mother’s violin cradled between the curve of her shoulder and neck. The bow’s quicksilver glint matched the one in her eyes, which were no longer green. His heart seized up and he forgot to breathe. He had no weapons. There was nowhere for him to run.

She carefully set down the violin and bow and caressed the instrument. Her beauty was uncanny. When she looked at Jack again, her gaze was once again absinthe green. “Did I ever thank you for saving me from the ganconer?”

He set his booted feet on the floor and whispered, “Who are you?”

“What matters is who
you
are, Jack.” She drew her fingers through her raven hair, letting it drift across the white skin above her bodice. “One of the last in a line of
taltu,
shamans and spirit walkers and troublemakers who, according to myth, are descended from the child of a wolf sorcerer and a mortal girl who lost her way in the Hungarian forest. A charming tale, that.”

She rose and walked to him, clasped his hands, drew him up. His gaze fell to her lips, soft and blushed. He didn’t know who began the kiss, but it became its own creature as her arms snaked around his shoulders and he crushed her body against his.

She whispered, “They will always leave you, Jack. If you come with me, time will stand still. You’ll never lose anyone again.”

His mouth slid over hers. Her dark hair was like ropes of silk against his hands. He had nothing now.

In the old-fashioned laboratory where the fluorescence flickered, Jack gazed down at the broken doll that had been Lacroix. He hadn’t expected that—Grindylow weren’t supposed to be able to move while gazes were upon them. The fact that Lacroix had somehow found a way to remain mobile inside one of his horrific creations was troubling.