Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(7)
Author: Alexandra Bracken
“Had to ask the Bonecutter,” he said, passing the key to me to examine. It looked like two finger bones welded with a seam of gold. “We’re all set to open the tomb this weekend.”
“God’s teeth,” I muttered. “What did the key cost us?”
“Just the usual,” he said, shrugging a shoulder. “A favor.”
“We can’t keep handing out favors,” I said tightly, making quick work of switching off the music and the battery-powered candles.
“Why not?” He leaned a hip against the doorframe.
The small movement—that careless tone of voice—brought me up short. He’d never reminded me more of Nash, the crook of a man who had reluctantly raised us and drawn us into his profession, only to abandon us to it before either of us had passed our first decade of life.
Cabell cast a quick look around my Mystic Maven setup. “You’ll have to ditch this bullshit gig if you want to be able to pay the Bone-cutter with actual coin next time.”
Somehow we’d arrived at my least-favorite conversation yet again. “This ‘bullshit gig’ buys us groceries and pays for the roof over our heads. You could ask for more shifts at the tattoo parlor.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Cabell let out an irritating hum. “If we just went after a legendary relic—”
“If we just found a unicorn,” I interrupted. “If we just uncovered a lost trove of pirates’ treasure. If we just caught a falling star and put it in our pockets . . .”
“All right,” Cabell said, his smile falling. “Enough. You’ve made your point.”
We weren’t like the other Hollowers and Nash, who chased mist and dreams. Sure, selling a legendary object on the black market could make you thousands, if not millions, but the cost was years of searching for an ever-dwindling number of relics. The magic users of other parts of the world had secured their treasures, leaving only Europe’s up for grabs. And, besides, we’d never had the right resources for a big get.
“Real money comes from real jobs,” I reminded him. And whether I liked it or not, Mystic Maven was a real job, one with flexible hours and fair wages graciously paid under the table. We needed it to supplement the for-hire work we took from the guild library’s job board, especially as the number of those postings thinned and clients cheaped out on the finder’s fees.
Mystic Maven may have been a tourist trap built on incense and fish-stick-scented woo-woo nonsense, but it had given us the one thing we’d never had before. Stability.
Nash had never enrolled us in school. He had never forged identity paperwork for either of us, the two orphans he’d collected from different sides of the world like two more of his stupid trinkets. What we had was this world of Hollowers and sorceresses, unknown and unseen by nearly everyone else. We’d been raised at the knee of jealousy, fed by the hand of envy, and sheltered under the roof of greed.
The truth was, Nash hadn’t just forced both of us into this world—he had trapped us in it.
I liked the life we had carved out for ourselves, and the small measure of stability we’d scrounged now that we were older and could fend for ourselves.
Unfortunately, Cabell wanted what Nash had: the potential, the glory, the high of a find.
His lips compressed as he scratched at his wrist. “Nash always said—”
“Do not,” I warned, “quote Nash at me.”
Cabell flinched, and for once, I didn’t care.
“Why do you always do that?” he asked. “Shut down any mention of him—”
“Because he doesn’t deserve the breath it takes to say his name,” I snapped.
Draping my leather satchel over my shoulder, I forced a tight smile onto my face. “Come on, we’ll check the library’s job board and then stop by the Sorceress Madrigal’s to give her the brooch.”
Cabell shuddered at the mention of the sorceress’s name. I patted his shoulder. In all fairness, she’d fixated on him at the consultation with an intensity that had alarmed both of us, even before she decided to lick a drop of sweat from his cheek.
I locked up and followed Cabell down the creaking staircase and out into the boisterous night. Tourists milled around us, merry and pink-cheeked from the crisp early-autumn air.
I narrowly avoided colliding with several of them as they craned their heads to gawk at the Quincy Market building. The sight of them leaning in for photos in front of restaurants, eating apple cider donuts, pushing strollers with sleepy kids up the cobblestones toward their hotels.
It was a vision of a life I’d never known, and never would.
Echoing laughter greeted us as we entered the atrium of our guild’s library, turning my skin as cold as the marble walls.
Nothing good ever came out of a Hollower fete, especially this close to midnight, when curses thrived and people’s judgment turned soggy with drink.
Now I wished we had stopped for dinner instead of walking over to Beacon Hill, where the library occupied an inconspicuous town house.
“Ugh,” I said. “Perfect timing.”
“You do have a knack for always running into the people you least want to see,” Cabell said. “It’s almost like the library is trying to tell you something.”
“That I need to find a way to steal their keys so they can’t get back in?”
Cabell shook his head. “When are you going to realize that pushing people away only ends one way—with you alone?”
“You mean my happily-ever-after?” I shot back, making sure I’d shut the door firmly behind me.
The All Ways door had been removed from a powerful sorceress’s vault over a century ago, when our Hollower guild was founded. Unlike the sorceresses’ skeleton knobs, which were used to anchor one fixed end of a particular Vein to the other, the All Ways door could open an infinite number of temporary passageways—it could take you anywhere you could picture clearly in your mind, so long as you’d been given a copy of the door’s brass key.
Cabell and I had inherited our membership key from Nash, who had received it upon the reluctant acceptance of his application to the guild. His required donation—the shield of Aeneas—had been a notable enough relic that the other guild members were willing to overlook his rather scruffy reputation.