Bury Their Bones (Wicked Fortunes Book 2)

by AJ Merlin

  All at once, he straightened, head cocked as if he was listening. “But I do it all the same, don’t I?” He murmured. “Even without the promises, promises.”

  “You’re insane,” I accused, like it would make any kind of difference to him.

  His head rolled forward so his eyes could meet mine. “Without a doubt,” he agreed. “But do you know what I really am, George?”

  I held my breath. Would he tell me why he was doing this? Would he give me the satisfaction I wanted, no, needed in order to understand why he did this?

  The necromancer beckoned me forward with one finger.

  Stupidly, I took two steps towards him, the wolves not going far. Then another step until we were on the same peak of the roof.

  “I’m not coming closer,” I warned. “What are you? Surely you can tell me. There’s no one else to know.”

  His smile was slow, and there was something in his eyes I didn’t understand.

  Agony. Tears fell from them when he blinked, carving rivulets in the dirt on his face.

  “I’m a secret,” he said simply.

  A skittering sound behind me made me turn, and a wolf at my side snarled.

  Teresa was coming for me, jaws wide and eye wild.

  And in front of me, the necromancer’s fashioned pet lunged, hands outreaching for my throat.

  I was trapped.

  Chapter 31

  Time seemed to slow down. Teresa bounced off my wards, only to collect herself and lunge again. At the looming threat, my magic came to my hands faster than I could have imagined.

  Two more wolves appeared, grabbing at Teresa and taking her down. The original two blocked the first, taking the hit that had been intended for me.

  I looked down when my fingers curled around something unexpected, and I found the Aspect of the devil, her bladed whip, in my hands.

  When had I even…?

  No. This wasn’t the time. The necklace at my throat was warm but not hot, and I needed to keep it from short-circuiting my magic.

  I started to take it off, then paused. What if they did get out of control? What if Nathanial wasn’t dead, and they hurt him?

  I had to leave it on. Just in case.

  Teresa rose, fingers digging into the throat of one of my wolves, and I lunged forward, striking out at her with the tip of the whip.

  She didn’t even try to dodge. It made contact with her face, but she barely stumbled, her attention still on the wolf in her grip.

  “We’ve done this before,” the necromancer said from somewhere at my back. “And I remember how that ended. Do you? Should we skip to the part where you’re broken and shattered on the ground, hoping your monsters appear to save you?”

  His words twisted around me, dragging to light my own insecurities.

  “I remember too,” I said, unzipping one of the pockets of my shirt and pulling out a small, crystalline bottle. The opaque, shimmering liquid inside didn’t need any light to be brilliant on its own. Magic made it shimmer and caused bubbles to continuously form in the potion.

  I tossed it at Teresa, and the crystal shattered against her skin.

  When the potion hit the open air, it exploded into a ball of flame, magnificent in the night, and I lunged forward, hitting her hard with the blade tip of the whip. It cut deep, drawing blood, and when I pulled back, the end dragged through the potion, caught fire, and blazed.

  Now the wolves and I harried her, forcing her back along the roof while the other two kept the second thing busy at my back.

  She was so close to the edge that one more step would send her over–

  Teresa righted herself and lunged for me, hands outstretched like claws as she let out that terrible shriek once again.

  I moved, but the whip was in a bad position.

  She was going to catch me, and that fire would burn me just as easily as her.

  A shape appeared next to me, materializing from a tendril of my magic and leaping off of the roof to meet her.

  The wolf caught her in its jaws and sent her back, throwing her over the edge and to the ground below. I ran to the edge of the roof, a second bottle in hand, and looked down.

  There she was. Teresa’s body lay splayed on the grass, no sign of my wolf, and the flames flickered out on the ground around her.

  Her hand twitched. A violent spasm that made me grit my teeth and had my wolves growling from where they stood beside me.

  Before she could get up completely, I threw the second bottle at her, watching it fall and tumble end over end before the crystal met her face with a soft shattering noise.

  She stared at me, her mouth opening and her hand reaching out as if asking for help.

  And then her body erupted into flame.

  But that look on her face….

  I stepped back, suddenly full of misgivings. I clenched my hand over the handle of the whip.

  She…she hadn’t felt it. She hadn’t been alive.

  No matter that, in that moment, she’d looked like she did.

  My stomach rolled, insides clenching and going very cold. I couldn’t-she was dead, I repeated over and over to myself.

  I hadn’t just burned a living person who could feel it.

  Goddess, what if all of his creations could feel what I was doing to them? What if they weren’t just reanimated flesh and bones?

  I blinked at the sound of my wolf’s growl, only it sounded much louder than it had a moment ago.

  When I looked down, I found that there were four wolves at my side. Another three harried the necromancer’s pet, and worst of all, the necklace at my throat felt hot.

  “No–“ I whispered, reaching up to grab it. “No! I can’t lose them!”

  The jawbone burned my fingers, flaring white-hot and causing me to cry out.

  As it did, the whip disintegrated to ash in my hands, and the wolves suddenly vanished.

  I was all alone once again, with not even my magic to help me for the next few seconds.

  Turning to look at the necromancer, I grit my teeth when our eyes met.

  He hadn’t moved. He barely seemed to care what was going on, and it occurred to me that it was a damn good thing he wasn’t dead set on killing me.

  The monster at his side moved around him, tilting its head first one way, then the other.

  “I guess you still don’t know, do you?” The necromancer asked almost mournfully.

  “Know…what?” I asked, meeting his irritated glare with a look of confusion.

  “He will not keep his promise,” the necromancer shrugged. “He will not keep his promise when we get to London.” His gaze turned mournful. “I never wanted them, Mr. Harker. The little lives, that are less than flies…” he spread his arms wide to encompass everything.

  I remembered more and more of the movie now. It played inside my brain on a loop as I tried to pinpoint what he meant.

  The thought made my hands clench.

  My magic was coming back now. I could feel it surging in my body, and with just a little push, I had the Form of the Devil in front of me.

  “I am a secret, you know. What am I, George?”

  I narrowed my eyes at his words. He was calling me Jonathan Harker, again. But that made no sense. Jonathan Harker slew Dracula, not a necromancer, or–

  “You’re Renfield,” I whispered.

  If I was Jonathan Harker…well, he’d already told me his part in the movie, hadn’t he? Renfield. Dracula’s servant who’d been caught and put under the vampire’s control and promised the lives of flies and other little creatures.

  He straightened like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, but that put it squarely on mine.

  Hadn’t he said it? Hadn’t he been saying it this whole damn time?

  Only I was too tunnel-visioned to understand.

  “But who–“

  “No, no we can’t, we mustn’t.” He pressed a finger to his lips. “The bats are everywhere. They cannot know.”

  “Renfield,” I said again, more
firmly this time. The Devil shifted in front of me, her hands curling around nothing as my own emotions flared.

  Everybody needs a Renfield, he’d said at the warehouse.

  But if he was Renfield, where was Dracula?

  The sound of a vehicle caught my attention, and both of us turned to watch a black car peel into the driveway, breaks slamming as one door opened.

  Akiva emerged, his blade in hand as Yuna did the same behind him.

  “George!” She called, our eyes meeting.

  Over the ground, a white shape shot towards us, tails streaming behind it as it ran for the house.

  “Wait,” I said, looking at the necromancer again. “Wait, please. You have to tell me–“

  He shook his head, and the monster at his side rose with gaping jaws. “We’re too late, too late. The townspeople are here, and that means he can give us his full attention.” The necromancer tipped his head back, staring at the moon. “Look. I think I see him now. Him and his shadows.”

  I looked up as well, but saw only clouds. “What? But there’s nothing…” When I looked down, the necromancer was staring at me. The monster stirred again, and there were footsteps on the porch.

  Merric apparently didn’t need a door. The fox surged over the roof, coming to stand at my side.

  The man didn’t speak. His monster rose, rearing backward and opening a mouth that should have never existed. It let out a deafening scream and lunged forward, coming straight for me.

  I threw the crystalline bottle at the form of the Devil as she moved, fast and low along the rooftop to meet the creature. The fire exploded on her, but my magic could not hurt her.

  When the flames touched the monster, however, it screamed again, giving me time to direct the Devil to grab its throat in her flaming hand. The other she used to grab the mouth, keeping it up and away from her.

  Beside me, Merric’s form changed until he stood on two legs at my side, radiating darkness and cold.

  Before I could even ask what he was planning on doing, the fox lifted one arm, blackness spreading from his fingertips and up his arm like spidery veins.

  Power swirled around his fingers, flowing like little rivers of magic, and then exploded outward.

  Like hooks, they sank into the necromancer’s pet, pulling it down to the roof and forcing it there.

  “Do it, George,” Merric whispered, the blackness swirling up and over his shoulder.

  I looked at him, suddenly caught by the way the fur on his tails was darkening, turning to an inky black.

  His ears, too, turned dark, until he was like a velvet nightmare beside me.

  When I stared for too long, he looked at me with black, black eyes. There was nothing there except an abyss that almost hurt.

  He’d told me before that I’d seen his true form.

  Had he lied to me?

  “Now," he snarled through fangs that curved to dangerous points.

  Snapped out of my shock, I looked to the necromancer again.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, lifting my hand as the Devil rose too. She was all aflame now, her body alive with the halo of fire that radiated heat. I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing to.

  Maybe it was all the people who went into this monster.

  All the people I was about to incinerate.

  I didn’t let the thought shake me. I urged my magic to rise to a crescendo, then sent the swirling inferno and shape of the Devil down onto the monster’s shrieking, struggling form.

  The effect was immediate. As she dug into him with her hooked claws, the flames ate at him. Soon the blaze was too bright to look at, and in it I could feel the Devil disappear.

  My arm fell, and Merric lowered his own a second later. He moved, but when I looked, he was gone.

  A cry from the other side of the inferno met my ears, and when I looked up from the blaze, I saw that Merric was blocking off the necromancer’s attempt of escape.

  “Wait!” I called, sure that we were about to have company in the form of my other friends. “Merric don’t–” he didn’t. He lifted a hand that the man recoiled from as if hit, but did nothing more than that.

  I approached them warily, hands clenched at my sides.

  The necromancer turned, tears running freely down his face.

  “Who is your Dracula?” I demanded, hoping to use his own words to coax the answer out of him. My heart pounded in my chest-I needed to know. I needed to understand–

  He sobbed. “I don’t want to.” He wasn’t talking to me. His eyes were wide and full of terror, but no longer fixed on me.

  They were fixed on the flames.

  “Please…I don’t want to burn,” he begged, and took one step closer to the heat of the fire.

  He shuddered, then looked at me with one hand outstretched as if asking me for help.

  “I should have never invited him in,” he whispered through the tears.

  And threw himself into the fire.

  I couldn’t help but watch. I couldn’t help but see the flames licking at him, his skin cracking, while his screams grew in pitch. And his face–

  My vision was cut off suddenly as cold arms wrapped around me.

  “Don’t look, George,” Merric whispered, wrapping his tails around me like a furry barrier between me and everything. “Don’t look. You don’t want to see.”

  His skin warmed as he held me to him, and from the corner of my eye, I saw his tails fading from black back to their brilliant white.

  When I finally looked up at his face, I saw the blackness recede from his eyes, returning them to their normal yellow.

  “I know what he meant,” I whispered, my hands shaking.

  There were footsteps on the roof now. Someone else was calling my name.

  Merric watched me without a word.

  “You heard him too,” I accused very, very softly.

  “Not now,” he breathed, pulling me against him again. “Later, but not now.”

  His tails moved, letting me see over his shoulder. Cian stood there, and behind him the flames died as Indra stepped into them and nosed something that I could not look at.

  “Did you find Nathanial?” I asked, fingers curling in Merric’s shirt.

  “If you mean the guy in the kitchen, he’s fine,” Cian promised. “Akiva is with him.” He looked over his shoulder, then back at me with a worried frown tugging at his lips. “George…” He blinked as if he didn’t know what to say.

  “You stopped him,” Yuna said as I straightened.

  The kitsune stared at the dying embers, looking at the body that I couldn’t force myself to lay eyes on.

  “He won’t hurt anyone else,” the cecaelia went on as my eyes found her face. “You stopped him, George.”

  Had I?

  My mind flashed back to what he’d said–what he’d been saying since the first time I’d met him.

  Maybe he truly was insane, and his rambling were just that.

  Maybe now, the killings would stop and my brain could stop feeling like everything was still so wrong.

  My eyes landed on Cian, who walked around the fire with Indra in his hellhound shape picking his way through the inferno like it wasn’t hot at all. He nosed at something I didn’t want to look at, then snorted.

  Surely, if there was something more to find, they would find it. I had to believe that with all of them here, I could stop worrying about the necromancer’s riddles if they did not find cause to worry either.

  Once the adrenaline wore off, I was sure I’d feel differently.

  Or maybe not.

  Chapter 32

  “You’re sure?” I asked, crossing the floor of my room again with my phone held to my ear. The carpet of my room was soft to my bare feet, and I was surprised I hadn’t worn a hole in it yet.

  “I’m sure, cher.” Nathanial sounded tired. It had been only a few days since his mother’s funeral, and his entire community would be in mourning for months, if not longer.

  They’d lost so much in the span of one
night. First Bernadette and Ambrose, then Teresa. All of them had been elders in the community and valued highly.

  “I just worry…” I carded my fingers through my hair. “But if you hear of any other voodoo practitioners being killed, you’ll tell me?”

  “I’ll tell you,” he affirmed. “George…” he trailed off, as if he wanted to ask me something.

  “Yeah?” I murmured.

  “Nothing,” he said at last. “Come visit soon, all right? I need a little noise now that…” I could hear him suck in a sharp breath. “Just come visit soon.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Nathanial hung up. I felt strange. Anxious, like I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Our conversation hadn’t done much to settle my nerves.

  I stared at my phone and the messages from my lovers that had gone unanswered. Indra had invited me out, as had Yuna, but I just needed to be sure.

  Aveline had been here as well, with her new Loa boyfriend. They’d both asked if I wanted to go to Euphoric.

  I’d turned them down too.

  With no answers to my changing magic and no way to know if the necromancer had been telling the truth, I couldn’t help but think I should be doing something more than…whatever it was I was doing with my time.

  But it’d been ten days. Wouldn’t the necromancer’s Dracula have attacked if he’d been telling the truth?

  Movement caught my eye. I glanced up, seeing Merric’s furry white shape in the mirror.

  In my reflection, he perched on my shoulders, eyeing me disdainfully.

  “Shouldn’t you be out with the troublesome trio?” I teased, a small smile spreading over my lips. “I know they invited you to go see Couch Mayhem tonight.”

  He rolled his eyes as if he hadn’t practically kidnapped me to see When Couches Attack only a few weeks ago.

  “They only invited me to get you out of the house.” The fox’s image vanished, replaced by Merric’s real reflection as he plucked the phone from my hand and set it down on my vanity.

  I turned, surprised that he stood behind me. “You’re really here,” I murmured. “I thought you might not be.”

  “When are you going to stop looking for problems to stick your nose into?” he asked flatly, his arms in the pockets of his light hoodie.