LORD OF BONES

CHAPTER ONE



RAMSEY



The woman and the youth had been on the road for eight months, although it seemed longer. In the beginning there was a man who traveled with them: very tall, broad-shouldered, with dark cropped hair and vivid, changing eyes.
But then he would leave, and they were alone.

The youth’s name was Ramsey. He had just turned seventeen. He was thinner and smaller than he’d like to be, and yet he had no problem in bars. Sometimes, like tonight, the bartender would hitch in a breath to ask for I.D. and Ramsey would tilt his head and look at him. Just look at him. The bartender would stand there and stare, and a moment would pass in which neither of them said anything. It wasn’t like Ramsey possessed any real supernatural power – not like some people he knew – but there was something about his eyes, Ramsey had learned, his eyes and his scars, that made people like this bartender always step back and say, “Okay. So what’ll it be?”
“Scotch,” Ramsey always said. “Neat.”
He rarely drank it. He just liked to order it.

They had come south through the Canadian/American border and tonight they found themselves in wine country. Ramsey had spent the afternoon kicking around the town, enjoying the sweeping vistas and clear, lemon-colored sunlight after all those days of northwest rain. Maybe, when this business of theirs was finished and the world was set right again – at least, set back to what it was before Asha’s demons found their way into it – they could move here, live here, the three of them, Jess and Kai and Ramsey. Be like an actual family. Have a horse ranch or something. Ramsey knew nothing about either horses or ranches, but he liked the idea. A lot.
The town seemed a mix of stylish yuppies who drove up from the Bay Area for the weekends and aging long-haired hippie types in sandals and tie-dyed t-shirts.
The girl at the bar didn’t seem to be either.
She was brown-haired, brown-eyed, and she caught Ramsey’s eye for several reasons. One was because she reminded him of someone he had known not so very long ago – his first love, you could say, if you were inclined to say it – and whom he still had trouble believing was actually, and most unfairly, dead.
The other reasons were like things that clawed his spine.
The girl noticed him – people did, although rarely for the reasons Ramsey preferred – but her gaze went flat with disinterest. She was talking to a couple at the bar. The man and woman were both tall and fair-colored, looked like siblings, although earlier they’d been engaging in some serious public affection involving tongue. Ramsey had to hope that brother-sister wasn’t the case.
The brown-haired girl tossed her head back, displaying a pale sweep of throat. The man and woman exchanged glances and the man gestured for the bartender to serve the girl another drink.
Beyond the windows, the sun finished setting. Darkness gathered deep and close and silent, that darkness of the country which still unnerved him.
The couple was getting up from the bar. The dark-haired girl spun round on her black leather stool, stumbled as she got off it, and laughed. The couple was quick to close in on her. She clutched both their arms for support, muttered, “It’s these frigging heels,” and laughed again.
They left the bar, the girl’s heels tripping across the polished hardwood. Then they were heading out the double doors and down the wide porch steps, and Ramsey touched the knives, strapped flat and cool along his forearms beneath the sleeves of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, felt the presence of the Rugers that had been spell-modified just for him: the .45 Auto holstered at his hip, the 9 mm at his ankle. There was a small bone amulet on a black leather cord around his neck. He touched it for luck. Jess would be furious, he knew, but there was no other option.
You saw what you saw and you couldn’t unsee it.
You had to do the right thing.
He left money on the bar and followed them, the couple and the girl.



The motel was a crumbling Spanish-style affair that had once been charming and romantic. But that was a long time ago.
The air held the scents of jasmine and citrus; the shadows were layered and lush. The couple, the girl sandwiched firmly between them, was passing through an archway draped with dead ivy and into the overgrown courtyard when the tall fair-haired man lifted his head and took notice of Ramsey. Behind him, water pooled in a broken stone fountain. The only light came from the stars overhead.
“Hey,” the guy said. “Kid. You following us?”
“The girl,” Ramsey said. “Get away from her.”
The woman looked across the girl’s head to her partner. “Steven, who is this freak?”
Steven said, “And there’s some reason you think I should know this?”
The girl looked through the shadows to Ramsey.
“Maybe you should go home,” she said quietly.
And she shook herself free of the arms around her shoulders and came forward, one step, two steps, her face and body edging into enough starlight for Ramsey to see the way her eyes widened. “You,” she breathed. “Hey. I know you. From the desert.”
The woman said, “You know this freak?”
“I tasted him,” the girl said again. And grinned. “We talk about you,” she said. “There are lots of rumors. But you’re ordinary now, aren’t you? You’re like any other stupid kid.“
Ramsey clicked off the safety and aimed the .38 at her face. “Get away from her,” he told the couple. “She’s not what she seems.”
“Hey,” the man said. “Hey. Wait a sec. You don’t have to do this—“
“Get away from her.”
“You want money? We’ll give you money—“
“She’s not what she seems.”
“I’m not,” the girl agreed.
Her mouth opened wide, and then wider, and her tongue snapped like a whip across the fifteen feet that separated her from Ramsey. The end of the tongue lashed round the barrel of the pistol and he had a moment to see the wet pulsing texture, the wine-red color laced with black, before the gun ripped from his hand and flew across the courtyard. Someone was screaming. The woman was screaming while the man’s face went loose with shock. “Get,” Ramsey yelled, which was the only thing he had time to yell before the girl was coming at him, her face twisted, her hands up in the air and curled into claws. She had not Altered but he could glimpse the demon in her anyway, as if her human skin had turned transparent and her demon face was there for the whole world to see, and wouldn’t that be a traffic-stopping sight on Main Street –
He punched her in the throat. It was a good, well-aimed blow, the way Kai had taught him, and the force was enough to put her on pause, stagger her back a few steps. They held eyes for a moment, then she grinned and darted into shadow. A bullet slipped past his cheek, the crack of it wild in his ear. He threw himself behind the stone fountain, the smell of wet rotting plants in his nostrils. Shadowy figures were moving along the second-floor walkways. One of the doors slammed open, then shut again. Then came the sound of a deep, throaty chittering. They were talking to each other. How many of them were there? The blonde woman was running out through the archway, into the parking lot. The man was right behind her but as he stepped beneath the arch, shadows moved in from either side and swallowed him from view; there was a wet, terrible crunching sound, and then the screaming turned high-pitched and liquid…and ceased.
A bullet buried itself in the stone fountain. Chips flew against his face. Ramsey ducked and moved round. His palms were slick with sweat and he wiped them quickly on his jeans before grabbing the second pistol from the ankle-holster and switching off the safety. The gun warmed quickly in his hand, not just because of his touch but the spellcasting Kai had worked over it just before he’d left them. Ramsey took aim at one of the shadows on the walkway and fired. He could see the glints the bullet made in the air as it shimmered apart into stronger faster versions of itself. One of the chittering shadows crumpled against the wall; another slumped over the railing. Ramsey waited for – wanted – it to fall, craved the sound of impact, but it remained there like a busted toy.
Usually the hybrids didn’t bother with guns, barely knew how to use them. They wanted to bite and claw and rip. They craved the intimacy. The taste.
The chittering grew more frantic; filled the air; there was laughter, shouts of “Boyo, boyo!” and someone made a crack about fresh tender boy-meat. Ramsey was in overdrive now; firing at the shadows, at the faces that came looming out at him. And then there was nothing left in the gun and he tossed it aside and slipped out a knife and hurled it at the thing that was coming at him from his left, a kid near his own age with a pockmarked face and eyes that weren’t eyes but sockets filled with blood. The knife went deep into his chest and the kid who wasn’t really a kid hit the ground and went into convulsions. Then he pulled the knife from his chest and laughed and started chopping off his own fingers. Crazy, Ramsey thought, not for the first time and not the last, god, they’re so fucking crazy –
And a thought behind that, even as he slipped the other knife from its sheath: I am outnumbered. Doors were opening, shadows coming out into the courtyard, onto the walkways. Nobody was firing anything at him anymore. They weren’t running towards him, either; they were taking their time, watching him, enjoying this. “Hey,” one whispered, “hey chick-chick. You’re a tough little chick-chick.”
“A cute little chick-chick,” said a female voice from the other side of him.
“Cute on the inside too, I bet,” said someone else. “Let’s find out.”
And there was a new shadow in the doorway.
A woman. Tall, slender, with long dark hair hanging down her back, dressed in jeans and a black hooded cardigan. She looked younger than her twenty-nine years, until you got close-up, saw her eyes: then she looked older. “Ramsey,” she yelled, “take cover.”
Ramsey felt the pulse in the air as unseen power swept the courtyard. The doors to the motel rooms all slammed shut. The hybrids were trapped in the open.
Take cover. She didn’t mean it in the usual sense. What she meant was for him to grab the amulet around his neck and fold himself into as small a ball as possible. The amulet burned against his palm, which hurt, but he knew better than to let go. He felt a strange, shivery sensation, as the spell encoded in the amulet kicked into life and sent threads of what looked like something electric weaving round him, knitting into his own personal force field.
The air was raining fire.
He did his best to shut down his senses to what was happening around him: the shrieks like acid that ate the air, the stench of peeling, burning, roasting flesh. He went away to a good place in his mind. He thought of Lauren kissing him in the little attic bedroom in his foster parents’ house in what now seemed a very long time ago.
And then, when it was done, when the last of the screaming had curled itself into nothing, when there was nothing left but the stench of hair and skin and clothes and something else, a bilious blood-rot kind of smell – if cancer had a smell, Ramsey thought, it would be just like this, of dead and dying demon-things.
The bodies were crumpled up burning things. The nature of the flames began to change, the color taking on a faint bluish hue; death triggered something deep inside the hybrid body that made it burn from within, consume itself until it was nothing but a pile of odd, amber-colored ash.
“Jess,” he said. Except he had no voice. He cleared his throat and spoke her name again: louder, stronger. “Jess.”
A female voice hissed in his ear, “So that’s her name?”
An arm around his chest, so tight he couldn’t breathe; a claw in his hair, yanking his head back.
The brown-haired girl from the bar.
“Summoner,” she called out. “Summoner…Where are you?....Come out, come out and play…”
The corpses burned, casting light and shadow across broken tile, the moss-covered stone of the fountain.
“I’m here,” Jess said.
She stood in front of them, the light carving out her features. Dark hair fell across one eye; the other had a blue, calm, hollow cast.
“Good!” crowed the girl. “I wanted you to watch!”
Hot breath on Ramsey’s throat and just as he felt his skin start to break beneath jagged teeth he was free again, the hold against his chest turning spasm-tight and then letting go. He got to his feet and turned in time to see the girl in Jess’s arms. Jess was whispering in her ear. They might have been lovers, except for the look in Jess’s eyes, flat and cold like a shark’s; except for the way the girl’s body slumped to broken tiles. The girl-thing was grinning, her teeth smudged with blood. Her body arched and she made a long, rattling sound; and then she was gone.
Jess stared down at her for several moments, then knelt and ran her hand across the girl’s eyes, closing them.
The false Jess, the magic-summoned illusion which had acted as decoy, remained standing a few feet in front of Ramsey, the calm, hollow eye still on him. He said, “How long much longer will she – will it last?”
“Not long.”
The false Jess flickered and went out.



“Illuminate,” Jess muttered, and for a moment Ramsey thought she was talking to him. But sometimes she talked to herself when she was casting, particularly when she was tired or distracted; spoken words helped her focus. Light shimmered up from her right hand, and she knelt in front of Ramsey, holding the light near his face, examining him. He found her gaze unsettling, was unable to hold it very long. He wanted to stand up, but his knees were too weak. He was trembling.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just…a bit. You know. Shaken.”
The light danced along his vision.
“You can’t take these kinds of risks,” she said. For a moment he thought she would touch him. She did not. “If nothing else, think of me. How I would feel if I lost you. Okay?”
He wanted to say something – I would never do that to you, maybe, or I would rather die than cause you pain, which seemed not just mushy but stupid, since she was warning him not to die in the first place. But all he could do was nod.
And then she did touch him – her hands on his shoulders, pulling him into her. She hugged him fiercely, both of them on their knees, the smooth cool feel of her cheek against his. She let go just as hard, pushing him away.
The demon-things were burning less brightly now. Ramsey heard a shifting, crumpling sound as the body nearest him collapsed into ash. He said, “I only thought there was one of them. You know? Or maybe just a few, at the most. At the very most. I figured I could handle it. They’ve never – they’ve never hung out in these kinds of numbers before. At least not that we’ve seen. They took over the entire freaking motel.”
Jess was so still and silent it was hard to distinguish her from the shadows. At length she said, mildly, “Yeah. This looks like it was some kind of…gathering.”
Before this, they’d found hybrids in singles or pairs, roaming, hunting. The largest group they’d encountered had been the hybrids who’d hijacked a Greyhound bus passing through some desolute stretch of Montana. They had been playing some kind of game with the corpses, the bones. There had been five of them.
Ramsey cleared his throat. “How did you find me?”
“How do you think? I was on the Dreamlines.” She cast him a sidelong glance. “Lucky.”
The Dreamlines. She was talking about the in-between place: the borderland: the place that bridged different worlds, or realities, or states of being. Think of it as a kind of Twilight Zone if you wish, someone had once told Ramsey. The Summoners were made and defined by their relationship to it. The Dream Children, Ramsey had heard them called once, although he couldn’t remember by whom. The Dreamlines were their source of power and knowledge. Summoners spent a staggering amount of their lives in deep meditation, leaving their bodies behind as they mindshifted into the ‘Lines; Ramsey compared it to plugging in your cellphone for recharging. The longer, deeper, harder you traveled on the Dreamlines, the more powerful you were and could become. If you didn’t die first. Or go crazy.
When they were on the Dreamlines, the Summoners could track each other along what Ramsey imagined as psychic pathways. Every living entity belonged to a Dreamline, Jess had told him, and Ramsey knew that Jess could hone in on his own ‘Line like a dog could track steak on the barbecue. On the one hand it made him feel like he had a hovering older sister whom he was powerless to avoid; on the other it was infinitely reassuring, given what his life had become. And it was why, he realized now, he’d felt confident enough to try some demon-killing on his own. Lucky. Jess meant she could have been doing something other than Dreamlining: they were supposed to be on downtime, after all. She could have been taking a long shower, or watching TV in her motel room. Except that was the thing. Jess wasn’t exactly someone who ever kicked back and watched Lost. Ramsey wasn’t even sure if she slept anymore, or what sleeping requirements even were for someone like her, who had laid her humanity down for the dream- and blood-magic to hammer into something new. Something which had a hell of a lot more in common with her mentor and lover Kai Youngblood, who was over seven centuries old, than Ramsey himself.
“The hunting,” Ramsey said now. He thought maybe he should shut up but he didn’t seem able to. He was feeling the need to defend himself. “It’s never been like this before. I mean, it’s gotten so—“
“Easy,” Jess said.
“I thought I had gotten pretty good at it. I mean, I am good at it. Right?”
“Up until now has been the beginning.” Her voice was detached and mild; the kind of voice you might expect from a sociopath, Ramsey couldn’t help thinking, although Jess was hardly that. “Warm-up stuff,” Jess said. “For them. For us. It’s going to get a lot harder.”
“Harder?”
This was not the narrative Ramsey had worked out in his mind. After all, it had been a finite number of demon-things that had escaped into the world, and they were being tracked and hunted down by a number of other Summoners who were at least just as capable as Jess, and much more experienced. They had done this before, long ago. And it wasn’t like these things could go off and reproduce. They weren’t about to populate the planet with baby hybrids. The fact that they existed in this realm at all was due to an amazing confluence of events that weren’t likely to repeat themselves. So Ramsey had just figured that they’d keep getting killed, one by one and two by two, until there were no more left to die. And people like him could get on with their lives.
Find that horse ranch, maybe.
“Come with me,” Jess said. “Stay close.”
They checked the rooms on the first floor, and then the second; the doors opened easily at a muttered word from Jess. Many of the rooms had been trashed – curtains and cushions clawed apart, wallpaper splashed with stains about which Ramsey felt no desire to speculate – and many rooms showed no sign of activity at all, cobwebs in the corners and furniture layered with dust. One room reeked of rotting flesh, buzzed with flies. There was a dead woman propped in the armchair, her stiffened arms around a child’s teddy bear. The toy had been decapitated, the head placed atop the television, so that the toy and the dead woman stared at each other with the same dull gaze. This was the kind of thing hybrids did for fun. Ramsey averted his eyes before he could see the worst of the woman’s wounds. Jess’s voice was detached: that sociopath voice again. “I wonder how long she’s been missing.”
It was in the last room they found something interesting.
The carpet was littered with pizza cartons and fast-food wrappers. A rat contemplated them for an insolent moment before scuttling behind the dresser, and for some reason the toilet had been uprooted from the bathroom and placed on the second bed. Ramsey could glimpse something inside the toilet bowl – something that looked like a head of dark hair – but this room didn’t have that eau de rotting corpse. It smelled of Taco Bell and urine. Maybe the thing in the toilet bowl was just part of a doll which had suffered the same fate as the teddy bear. Doll parts, human parts. Demon humor. Ha ha, Ramsey thought, and wanted to throw up.
“Look at this,” Jess said, tapping a cheap DVD machine. “They were watching something.”
Ramsey noticed that the chairs in the room were angled towards the television, including chairs that must have been dragged in from other rooms. The TV was on, although the screen showed nothing except a smooth blankness. Jess glanced at the buttons on the DVD player, pressed play. As the first image appeared on the screen, she came round to stand beside Ramsey. Ramsey flashed on the room as it must have been just a few hours ago: filled with hybrids, their own multiple presences making them jittery, musky stench rising off those unwashed bodies. All of them turning to watch what he and Jess were watching now.
A man stood in a bare, featureless room and talked at the camera.
“That’s demon language?” Ramsey said.
The man’s voice rose and fell in odd rhythms; the words, if they were truly words, seemed to slither and hack at the air.
“One of their languages,” Jess muttered. “Kai says there are thirteen of them. That he knows of, anyway.”
The man was medium height, medium build, dressed in an ill-fitting brown suit too big in the shoulders. He looked like the kind of salesman you would only buy something from, Ramsey thought, because you felt sorry for him. He looked like a loser. Except as his little speech went on Ramsey felt himself getting caught up in it, the strange slashing rhythms of it, and the man’s eyes turned intense and hard.
Then he said, “Lucas Maddox,” and Ramsey’s body jerked with surprise.
“What –“ he said, but Jess had already bolted to the DVD player, stabbing at stop and rewind. The speech played again: the stream of gibberish, then the name, clear and distinct: “Lucas Maddox.”
They let the speech play on. The name came again near the end – “Lucas Maddox” – and then the man walked towards the camera and his hands came towards the lens – his nails were long, pointed, and tipped with scarlet – and the screen went dark.
Ramsey kept his voice low. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
He noticed, then, the way Jess’s body had turned rigid. The way she had turned away from him, as if she didn’t want him to see her face, the expression that might be written on it in that particular moment. She was pushing buttons on the DVD machine. It rattled and hummed, then gave up the disc. Jess found a jewel case on the dresser and snapped the disc inside.
She said, “You thought he died back in the desert?”
“I don’t know.” Ramsey was watching her carefully. He was thinking about how they’d never really talked about Maddox. During all the time they’d spent together, on the road, in the motels, during the stake-outs, and the brief celebratory periods after, relying on conversation and humor – when Jess was in a light enough mood to even have a sense of humor – to relieve some of the grim dark awareness of what they were doing and what was at stake, they had touched on pretty much every topic you could think of.
Except that one, Ramsey realized now. Except him.
“Maybe I was hoping,” he said finally. “Whatever he’s been doing, he’s been keeping on the low. Did you…” He noticed again the tight line of her shoulders her face still angled away from him. She was turning the jewel case through her fingers. She had great hands, he always thought, an artist’s hands. She had been a painter, once. Before all this. “Did you…” Again, he felt his voice falter. Why should it be so hard to ask her this? “Were you thinking he was dead?” Hell, maybe he was dead. Just because a hybrid was talking about him to others didn’t mean he was still --
“No,” she said, and now she lifted her head and looked at him. There was a hard set to her face, a flash of something in her eyes he couldn’t identify. Or maybe didn’t want to identify. “He’s out there. I’ve always known that.”