Bone Hunter

by Thea Atkinson

"What he knows about the Morrigan would fill a thimble," said a voice from the doorway. "What you need to know about her, you'd need to ask someone much older than Fayed."

  I didn't need to turn around to know who spoke.

  Maddox.

  CHAPTER 20

  I lifted my gaze to see him standing a few feet away. His hair was captured in its man-bun, wisps of russet clouding his earlobe where hair had escaped. His frame filled the doorway and I was reminded how big he was. I hadn't heard him come in, and if Fayed had, he made no sign of it. His eyes were on me. Steady, insistent, just like Maddox's were. I had the feeling that both were waiting for my reaction.

  Whatever Maddox had done to me had taken away the mental bruising and physical pain of my own beating, but the space left behind in my psyche left me uncomfortable. Like a critical part of character might have been dissected.

  My belly quivered and something in my throat ached. I tried to tell myself it was fear, but my voice was surprisingly even when I spoke.

  "You said we needed someone old," I said. "Someone like who?"

  He shrugged. All these hours later, he still clung to that suit jacket he'd given me at the gala. It was slung over his shoulder and it slid backwards until he had to grab at it to keep it from falling off entirely. I remembered the way it smelled of woodsmoke and whiskey and I looked down at my empty glass because for some reason looking at him just hurt too much.

  "Someone as old as I am I suppose," he said. "Someone who knows the Morrigan when he sees her."

  My head snapped up at that. He told me before that he was older than he looked.

  "You're trying to tell us you're that old," Fayed said disbelief heavy in his voice.

  Maddox ignored the question in favour of asking his own.

  "Who is asking about the Morrigan, anyway?" he said, advancing into the room. "What do you need to know?"

  "Isabella," Fayed said. "She just saw her outside. At least I think it was her."

  "I didn't just see her outside," I protested at the way it sounded as though I'd just run into a long-lost friend at the grocery store. "I've seen her couple of times. At the museum, on the way home from the Gala..."

  "You saw her at the Museum Gala?" Maddox said. "Don't take this the wrong way, Kitten, but she was not at the gala."

  "So says the ancient Morrigan expert," I spat out. I waved my hand in his direction in a dismissive gesture that I hoped annoyed him. "You couldn't have been looking too hard or you don't actually know who she is after all. She was there I'm telling you. I saw her with my own eyes just like I saw her outside. In fact, I thought Scottie was using her at first to get to the curator, she was so 'there'."

  "Trust me," he said. "I would know the Morrigan if I saw her."

  I sucked the back of my teeth, indicating what I thought of that.

  "Then why are you saying she wasn't? You had to have seen her. Pretty much the only teenager in the room, not counting the mummy."

  I felt Fayed's hand on my arm. "Isabella," he said. "There's no point in arguing."

  For some reason that was the last straw. I yanked my hand away.

  I stood and faced Maddox. "I'm telling you I saw her. And if you knew her by sight the way you say you do, you would have seen her at the gala."

  I was vaguely aware that my voice was raising in pitch and getting more shrill with each passing second, but I couldn't seem to jam the stopper back down on the opening.

  I stabbed my finger in the direction of the door. "If you knew her, Maddox, really knew her or even had eyes to see, you would have seen her outside waiting for me because she is no more than three feet outside that exit."

  Both men had the nerve to stand there looking for all the world like gentlemen awkwardly waiting for some manic woman to get over her hissy fit.

  I wasn't done, though. I had one more bit of hiss left in me.

  "So whatever connections you say you have with the supposed god, I highly doubt you're in the inner circle."

  I wasn't sure why it felt so good to say that, but it did.

  He took a deep breath and his gaze flicked toward Fayed and then back to me.

  When he spoke his voice was soft and soothing.

  "I do know her, Isabella," he said. "I know her well."

  "Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos," he chanted, ticking the words off on his fingers. "Nona, Decuma, and Morta. The Celts are the ones who called her the Morrigan. She likes that one. At least, she used to."

  I was nowhere near mollified by a diatribe of unpronounceable names.

  "So which is she?"

  He smiled. "All of them. None of them."

  He ran his hand through his hair and I noted it shook a little. Maybe I'd struck a target he didn't expect, but that didn't sound likely. Something else was bothering him.

  "She's far older than those incarnations, but they are all rooted in her somehow. The oldest of us know her when we see her. Humans, not so much. She's a shapeshifter. She can be whatever she likes."

  I seized on that information as evidence of my senses and flung it back at him.

  "She turned into a crow," I announced. "Right out there at Fayed's door. One great big crow with carrion stink on her breath and everything."

  I shuddered as I recounted it. "If she changes shape, then maybe you just didn't recognize her at the gala, but she was there."

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  He shook his head, stubborn. "There's one problem with that. She hasn't shown herself as the true Morrigan for centuries, let alone taken to a shapeshift."

  I stabbed my finger in his chest. I felt like he was accusing me of lying, of all things. And tonight, I would not put up with it.

  "That thing you say you would know on sight was right outside that door just minutes ago, washing my gala dress in a rain puddle. It was filled with blood. And then she accosted me. And then she told me I was going to die."

  The last of the words broke on a shrill note and at the sound of it my fingers curled into a fist.

  I felt Fayed's hand drop to my shoulder.

  "I didn't see her, Isabella," he said.

  His scent of patchouli and dish detergent wrapped around me. His hand where it lay wasn't warm the way a regular man's would be. It had heat, yes, but it was a sensation rather than radiant heat. It was another reminder that everything in this new world of mine was to be questioned.

  Maddox took a step closer and I backed up into Fayed. If he noticed he didn't react to it.

  "It wasn't her," he murmured. "It couldn't have been."

  "But she was there," I said. I even stomped my feet. "She was."

  Maddox shoved his hand into his pocket with a sigh and tapped his foot thoughtfully. After a few minutes, he moved toward the bar and reached over the counter. He hooked beneath it and came out with a tall bottle of absinthe.

  With a lithe grace unusual in a man his size, he pulled his legs up and over the bar, and with the bottle of absinthe in one hand, he reached for the glasses with another.

  Fayed did nothing to stop him when he slipped three fingers into three shot glasses and slid them one at a time along the counter at us.

  "I'd say it sounds like the Morrigan," Maddox said.

  "Thank you," I said and grabbed my shot glass. I felt very much like a celebratory shot was in order.

  Maddox lifted his index finger along the bottle as he held it. "Except," he said. "There's two things wrong with it. One: she appears only to warriors about to die, and as difficult as you can be, Isabella, I wouldn't exactly call you a warrior."

  We did agree on that, but I wasn't going to give him that satisfaction of saying it out loud.

  "Two," he said, pouring a bolt of fluid into Fayed's glass but looking directly at me. "And this is the big one. It's not possible for you to have seen the Morrigan because she renounced those powers centuries ago. She's no longer the deity she once was."

  I did see her," I said. "Maybe I'm not a warrior, and maybe I'm not about to die, but I saw something.
I saw her. She spoke to me. She warned me."

  "Let's say you're right," he said. "For argument's sake. You saw the Morrigan herself, three times?"

  He lifted an eyebrow for confirmation and when I nodded, he did too and went on.

  "If it was her physical aspect, Fayed would have seen her. I would have seen her, and I know the form she takes." He gripped my wrist when he said that. "I do know her physical form," he said. "Trust me on that."

  "Sure," I said sullenly.

  He ran his thumb along my wrist, making me squirm enough to pull away and reach for the shot glass. I gave him a glare till he poured a shot into it.

  I was aware of Fayed suddenly. Very aware. The way you feel when you've been caught groping someone when you thought you were alone. I pushed the shot down to Fayed and he tipped it at me before downing it. I couldn't look him in the eye.

  "So If we are to believe you know the Morgan and that you don't think it's her showing herself to Isabella," Fayed said to Maddox. "How do you explain what's happening to her?"

  He believed me. I could've reached out and hugged him.

  Maddox didn't seem impressed at all. "I'd say that what she saw was the shade of the Morrigan, and not the true God herself."

  "Rich," I said.

  He rattled coins in his pocket. "The Morrigan is a three-part deity. Humans might call it a concert of body, spirit, and mind. When she renounced those powers those parts split. That cast of herself that she sends to warriors in warning has no real body anymore. No mind."

  "That would explain why she seemed so insane," I muttered.

  "Mad, more like," Maddox said. "It's a more sympathetic word. More sorrowful. And that fits far better for the circumstances."

  He did indeed sound as though he felt every inch of that sympathy, and while I could applaud the sentiment in theory, I couldn't really feel the same way in practice.

  "Right," I said in response, totally knowing how callous I sounded and not caring. "Because I should feel sympathy for a mad teenager who threatens to kill me."

  He gave me a scolding look.

  "If that's the case," I said, trying to back pedal without looking like an idiot. "Then where is the body? What shape does she take in human form?"

  I said it as a dare, one I half expected him to take on, but I wasn't ready for the gauntlet to be picked up the way he did because I suppose I didn't really believe him until he jammed the right puzzle piece down into the picture.

  "Haven't you figured it out already?" he said. "You know her."

  He peered down into my eyes as though he was surprised I hadn't made the connection already.

  "Kassie is the body."

  CHAPTER 21

  "That's not true," I said. "You're lying."

  "Why would I lie?" he said. "Think about it Isabella."

  Why indeed. None of any of this was making any sense, the least of it being a teenage girl I had been in contact with for three years being something other than human. It seems to me I would have picked up on it. Surely I'd have had some clue things weren't what they seemed.

  Even as I considered it, I knew that I did have a few clues. No doubt I was just too stubborn or oblivious to pay attention to them. The strange demeanor that I explained away to myself as Asperger's or autism wouldn't alone have rung a bell, but when she had spelled me into the Shadow Bazaar to meet up with Maddox, that should have been a waving flag. When she had pushed me out of the bazaar through that same awful portal and then disappeared when things had got heavy with the Fae assassin should have been a waving red flag.

  Except I'd been ignorant about the otherworld and still flailing about for logical explanations for things that weren't normal.

  I'd been too eager to assume she was like me. Regular. Normal. Human.

  Just with very dangerous connections.

  "Kassie," I said out loud. "It wasn't just because the portal was there waiting for someone to see it and use it," I said. "She opened it. She was the reason I was able to get through."

  "The Blood Gate," Maddox said, his fingers halting mid air. "The most accessible for a mortal soul, if not one of the most uncomfortable."

  I stared at him for a long moment, remembering my journey through that gate, the way I told myself I would never travel through it again.

  "Blood gate because it requires blood," I said just making that connection too. "My blood."

  He tapped his fingers against the bar. "And hers," he said. "The bond created between both, one vouching for the other, opens the portal."

  "Why didn't you tell me before what she was?"

  He shrugged diffidently but there was nothing casual about his gaze. It held onto secrets still. I was sure of it.

  I remembered his reaction in his bazaar when Kelliope held her as captive collateral to flush me out and force me to give her the rune tile.

  "When Kelliope found me there and used Kassie as a hostage and the entire bazaar was trying to free her, you told me she didn't need help."

  I narrowed my eyes at him, as that whole scene loped through my memory. "You said she was fine."

  "Not fine," he argued. "I said she didn't need you, and she didn't. Every single creature in the bazaar would have died for her if need be."

  "But why?"

  He traced a water ring on the bar, keeping his gaze carefully hooded. "Because they would hope she would be grateful."

  I tracked his finger as it turned a water ring into a devil with horns. "Grateful?"

  He nodded. "She has power over even the gods, Isabella. She might be broken, but she is the only one who can intervene with fate, change paths, she can even resurrect a soul she wants to. If you could save the Morrigan when she's helpless or unwilling to save herself, you'd gain a powerful ally."

  "And yet Kelly didn't care. She was willing to use Kassie as bait to get me to give up that tile."

  He shrugged. "The Fae are not from this world. They're not bound by the same magics. Most of the creatures that move through the bazaar are of your world."

  "And you?" I said. I watched him keenly for his reaction. I still hadn't figured out where he sat in all this.

  "I care for Kassie. I have no need to curry her favor if that's what you're thinking."

  It wasn't really what I wanted to know, or what I'd asked, but it answered a question that would have been raised anyway.

  I watched him shove his hand in his jacket pocket, feeling around for something with a distracted look on his face as he waited for me to process it all. His cell phone, I supposed because he got a satisfied, relieved expression.

  He scanned my face the way Scottie might, searching to plumb the depths of its expression. I knew what he'd see. Fear. Anger. Worry. All of them mixed together for a dozen reasons, not all of them based in concern for my own safety, but that was certainly there too.

  "So what does she want with me?" I said. "Why do I keep seeing her?"

  He shrugged. "She joined her blood with yours to get you through the blood gate," he said. "My guess is that left an imprint on you. Maybe her shade is drawn to that."

  Something sparked in my mind like gears coming together with too much force and not enough grease. Something he was saying made those gears shift and change direction.

  Far too many things had happened for me to just discount the evidence of my eyes and ears. Just in the last twenty-four hours, a sidhe warlord had broken into my house, taken the glamor off the building in a fit of vengeance. The museum had been targeted by something I knew was supernatural even if Maddox claimed it wasn't him. The young girl had been at that gala.

  "You say Kassie is a god," I said carefully, and he flip-flopped his hand back and forth in answer.

  "Sort of. She's a bit more than a god, but it's the easiest description for a mortal."

  I was slowly piecing it together, letting the surprise lift away and leave in its place a wonderment that always came when solving a difficult problem. I let myself sort through the facts with mental fingers, sieving through th
e chaff that didn't fit the mesh.

  Whatever was going on, it wasn't because I, a human mundane, was at the heart of it.

  It was Kassie.

  Whatever was going on, if this circumstance was a heavy weight, she was the fulcrum it all balanced on. The other weights, how heavy, how light, they needed to be put down in just the right order to keep it aloft.

  I began methodically going over the talents. Kassie was a god. Kassie was missing. Kassie's shade had come to me in the only way it knew how.

  "Could she have been the one that caused all the ruckus at the gala?"

  His lips pressed together. "I doubt. She might have power over her shape at times, but not that kind of power...not being split from her triad nature."

  "It wanted something," I murmured out loud. "She wanted something. She told me the vampires had her."

  Fayed roused then and stretched his arms as though to encompass the room. "This vampire does not."

  "Shh," I said, feeling for the invisible thread of fabric that would unravel the entire cloak. It was there. Right there. I just had to push my hand out into the darkness.

  Strange that when I reached in, I felt the fur of my cat and the sound of glass breaking.

  "He wanted me to find a god's bones for him," I muttered out loud.

  "He, who?" Maddox asked, and I turned to him.

  "What do you know about the sidhe?" I asked him. It was a new term and while I was getting more comfortable using it, I still didn't know what it meant. What they could do.

  "They come from the ninth world, much like the fae do." Maddox waited for Fayed to toss a few peanuts into the air and catch them on his canines before he said more. "But they are not true fae. They are made fae. A hybrid of natural magic and human soul."

  I eased my eyes closed to see the warlord again and heard him talking. "Colin, he called himself."

  "You mean the fae who threatened to take the glamor off your apartment?" Fayed said.

  "Didn't threaten," Maddox muttered. "He took it."

  I could hear in his voice the reminder of finding me alone in my apartment, beaten to a pulp by a human man who shouldn't have been able to get in. As hard as the memory was, it overshadowed my fear of what he'd done to Alvin in return. Seeing it all in perspective now, I wasn't afraid of Maddox anymore.