Silver in the Bone (Silver in the Bone #1)(9)
Author: Alexandra Bracken

 

The only thing left now was to close out the job we’d done for the Sorceress Madrigal.

 

“All I’m saying is that those pearl buttons were rather fetching,” Cabell continued, dodging the after-dinner crowds in New Orleans’s French Quarter.

 

“They were shaped like stars,” I said, my face scrunching.

 

“You’re right, I take back what I said,” Cabell answered. “They weren’t fetching, they were enchanting. I think they would look lovely on you—”

 

I knocked my shoulder into his, rolling my eyes. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas.”

 

“Uh-huh,” Cabell said, taking in the sight of the iron balconies above us. A thin moon illuminated New Orleans in all its colorful glory and seemed to hang lower than usual.

 

“Why don’t we live here?” He sighed happily.

 

I could have named a dozen reasons, but only one mattered: Boston was our home. It was the only one we’d ever had.

 

We both instinctively slowed as we approached an unremarkable side street. An ivy-covered black mansion waited at the dead end of the alleyway, just beyond the last amber-colored pool of lamplight.

 

Rook House’s black gate creaked open at our presence, unbidden. Hawthorn berries littered the ground along the crooked walkway to the front porch. I held my breath, but their rotten stench found me anyway, slithering into my nostrils and lingering there.

 

The way my heart thumped painfully against my ribs stirred up the memory of waiting outside other mansions like this one, clutching Cabell’s small hand, praying that Nash wouldn’t get himself killed bartering with the sorceress inside.

 

“You’re sure you have the brooch?” he asked, even though he knew I did.

 

“I’ll be fine,” I told him.

 

“I can come with you, really,” he said, casting an uncharacteristically anxious look up at the house.

 

I pulled a black leather journal out of my workbag and pressed its worn cover against his chest. “Try a couple of potential key words while you wait.”

 

Nash’s journal, one of the few possessions he’d left behind, was a chaotic mess of stories and notes about relics, legends, and the magic users he’d crossed paths with over the years. Likely knowing his nosy young wards might read it, he’d written some of the entries in a key-word cipher. While we’d managed to figure out the key word to decipher most of the entries, the final one, written just before he’d vanished, had eluded us for years.

 

Cabell took the journal, but his uneasiness remained.

 

“It’s my turn,” I said. When it came to delivering goods to sorceresses, one of us always stayed outside, just in case the other was trapped inside with a client who refused to pay. I gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll be fast, I promise. Love you.”

 

“Don’t die,” he responded, leaning against the fence with one last sigh.

 

The Sorceress Madrigal’s home seemed to shiver with its own cold. The windowpanes chattered like teeth in their frames, and the bones of cracked marble and ironwork groaned in the breeze.

 

My gaze drifted up over the mansion’s age-worn face as I approached the sinking porch.

 

“All right,” I whispered to myself, rolling my shoulders back. “Just a delivery. Get the payment, get out.”

 

I always made it a point to research our clients before meeting with them, thereby significantly increasing our chances of securing the job and making it out of the meeting alive. But there’d been next to nothing about Madrigal in our guild’s library, and even Nash’s journal had only been semihelpful.

 

Madrigal—crone, master of all elemental affinities. No known relations. Never accept a dinner invitation.

 

Her work notice had remained untouched on our guild’s job board for months before I summoned the courage to take it.

 

My fist tightened around the brooch in its velvet pouch. Negotiating this job had come close to shattering my nerves, and they felt brittle again as my mind worked through all the contingencies if things went sideways. The wretched truth was, there was precious little we could do if Madrigal refused to honor our contract and pay us. That was the nature of doing business with a more powerful being; their whims were as changeable as fire, and you always had to be ready for the next burn.

 

The door opened before I could raise a hand to ring the bell.

 

“Good evening, miss.”

 

The sorceress’s companion all but filled the massive doorway, with his impossible height and shoulders as broad as the street was wide. Dearie, she called him, and whether that was his name or an endearment, I thought the safer thing was not to ask.

 

He bowed as I came closer, his features just as indistinguishable as the first time I’d come. A leather mask clung to the top half of his face like a falcon’s hood, shading his eyes, and he had poured his massive body into a fine, old-fashioned butler’s uniform.

 

“If you would be so good as to follow me, miss.” The man’s accent was strange, melodic in a way that didn’t sound entirely human, and likely wasn’t. Though they were rare in our world now, the sorceresses often bound creatures of magic into service for their long lifetimes.

 

The companion stepped back into the waiting shadows behind him. The smell of warm wax and candle smoke flooded my nose as I passed by him. The gold pin on his lapel, a chess piece with a horned moon over it—the mark of the Sorceress Madrigal—winked in the light of a nearby candelabra.

 

A wailing sax dueled with the sparkling notes of a piano from somewhere deep inside the house, slowly working themselves into a frenzy.

 

Finish the job, I thought, feeling the edges of the brooch dig into my palm.

 

“Is your mistress home?” I asked.

 

“Oh yes, miss,” the companion said. “She’s entertaining.”

 

My stomach hollowed. “Should I come back?”

 

“No, miss,” he said. “That would displease her.”

 

And like any good sorceress’s companion, he knew better than to risk doing that.

 

“All right,” I managed to say, hanging back a step to allow him to lead. I’d been so nervous on my first visit that Rook House had only registered as a blur of velvet and incense. Now I could take it in.

 

Like week-old cut flowers, the fine furnishings, artwork, and gilded trinkets had browned with age. The waste of it all was as breathtaking as the damp, stained rugs and the overwhelming reek of mildew and rot.