Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(4)
Author: Alexandra Bracken
The rain came down in torrents, battering my hair and bare feet as I scanned my surroundings. A thick mist churned around me, blanketing the hills. Trapping me there, alone.
“Cabell?” I yelled. “Cabell, where are you?”
I ran into the mist, the rocks and heather and thistle biting at my toes. I didn’t feel any of it. There was only the scream building in my chest, burning and burning.
“Cabell!” I screamed. “Nash!”
My foot caught on something and I fell, rolling against the ground until I hit another stone and the air blasted out of me. I couldn’t draw in another breath. Everything hurt.
And the scream broke open, and became something else.
“Cabell,” I sobbed. The tears were hot, even as the rain lashed against my face.
What good will you be to us?
“Please,” I begged, curling up. The sea roared back as it battered the rocky shore. “Please . . . I can be good . . . please . . .”
Don’t leave me here.
“Tam . . . sin . . . ?”
At first, I thought I had imagined it.
“Tamsin?” His voice was small, almost swallowed by the storm.
I pushed up, fighting against the sucking grass and mud, searching for him.
For a moment, the mists parted at the top of the hill, and there he was, as pale as a ghost, his black hair plastered to his skull, his near-black eyes unfocused.
I slipped and struggled up the hill, clawing at the grass and stones until I reached him. I wrapped my arms around him. “Are you okay? Cab, are you okay? What happened? Where did you go?”
“He’s gone.” Cabell’s voice was as thin as a thread. His skin felt like a block of ice, and I could see a tinge of blue to his lips. “I woke up and he was gone. He left his things . . . I looked for him, but he’s . . .”
Gone.
But Cabell was here. I hugged him tighter, feeling him cling back. Feeling his tears become rain on my shoulder. I had never hated Nash more for being everything I always thought he was.
A coward. A thief. A liar.
“H-he’ll be back, won’t he?” Cabell whispered. “Maybe he just f-f-forgot to say where he was g-going?”
I didn’t want to ever lie to Cabell, so I didn’t say anything.
“W-we should go b-back and wait—”
We would be waiting forever. I felt the truth of it down to my bones. Nash had finally unloaded his hangers-on. He was never coming back. The only mercy was that he hadn’t taken Cabell with him.
“We’re okay,” I whispered. “We’re okay. We’re all we need. We’re okay . . .”
Nash said that some spells had to be spoken three times to take hold, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that, either. I wasn’t one of the girls from the gilded pages of storybooks. I had no magic.
I only had Cabell.
The dark bristles were spreading across his skin again, and I felt the bones of his spine shifting, threatening to realign. I held him tighter. Fear swirled in the pit of my stomach. Nash had always been the one to pull Cabell back to himself, even when he fully shifted.
Now Cabell only had me.
I swallowed, shielding him from the driving rain and wind. And then I started to speak: “In ages past, in a kingdom lost to time, a king named Arthur ruled man and Fair Folk alike . . .”
No matter what they say, or how much they lie to themselves, people don’t want the truth.
They want the story already living inside them, buried deep as marrow in the bone. The hope written across their faces in a subtle language few know how to read.
Luckily for me, I did.
The trick, of course, was to make them feel like I hadn’t seen anything at all. That I couldn’t guess who was heartsick for a lost love or desperate for a windfall of money, or who wanted to break free from an illness they’d never escape. It all came down to a simple desire, as predictable as it was achingly human: to hear their wish spoken by someone outside themselves—as if that somehow had the power to make it all come true.
Magic.
But wishes were nothing more than wasted breath fading into the air, and magic always took more than it gave.
No one wanted to hear the truth, and that was fine by me. The lies paid better; the bald-faced realities, as my boss Myrtle—the Mystic Maven of Mystic Maven Tarot—once pointed out, only got me raging internet reviews.
I rubbed my arms beneath Myrtle’s crochet shawl, eyes darting to the digital timer to my right: 0:30 . . . 0:29 . . . 0:28 . . .
“I’m sensing . . . yes, I’m sensing you have another question, Franklin,” I said, pressing two fingers against my forehead. “One that’s your real reason for coming here.”
The glowing essential oil diffuser gurgled contentedly behind me. Its steady stream of patchouli and rosemary was powerless against the smell of deep-fried calamari drifting up through the old floorboards and the rancid stench of the dumpsters out back. The cramped, dark room circled in tighter around me as I breathed through my mouth.
Mystic Maven had occupied its room above Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace for decades, bearing witness to the succession of tacky seafood restaurants that cycled in and out of the building’s ground level. Including, most recently, the particularly malodorous Lobster Larry’s.
“I mean . . . ,” my client began, looking around at the peeling strips of floral wallpaper, the small statues of Buddha and Isis, then back down to the spread of cards I’d placed on the table between us. “Well . . .”
“Anything?” I tried again. “How you’ll do on your finals? Future career? Hurricane season? If your apartment is haunted?”
My phone came to the end of the playlist of harmonic rain and wind chimes. I reached down to restart it. In the silence that followed, the dusty battery-powered candles flickered on the shelves around us. The darkness gathered between them hid just how dingy the room was.
Come on, I thought, half desperate.
It had been six long hours of listening to chanting-monk tracks and mindlessly rearranging crystals on the nearby shelves between what few customers had come in. Cabell had to have the key by now, and after finishing up with this reading, I’d be able to leave for my real gig.