by Tracy Wolff
But before we take more than a couple of steps, a giant leg bone falls from the ceiling and crashes into the spot right beside us.
It shatters as soon as it hits the ground in a thundering explosion, bone shards flying like mortar shells in all directions. One slices me right beneath my left eye, and blood starts pouring down my face.
“Fuck!” Flint yells from across the cavern. “A dragon must have just died! I think the Boneyard is calling the bones home.”
“You think that’s what’s going on?” Xavier shouts as he grabs Macy’s hand and they make a mad dash for the landing pad area where she’d been working on building a portal earlier.
Moments later, the other leg bone falls—about six inches from where Xavier and Macy had been searching.
“We’ve got to go,” Flint yells. “Now!”
“We can’t go now,” Eden tells him. “We don’t have a bone yet.”
“Hudson and I found one,” I say, holding up our find as a giant rib bone falls in the back of the cavern.
“Then let’s blow this pop stand!” Xavier yells as he and Macy make a beeline for the cavern entrance.
“I’m with them,” Mekhi says, right before he fades to the front of the Boneyard—and doesn’t stop until he’s on the safe side of the entrance.
“Me too,” Jaxon agrees just as what I think is a tailbone comes crashing straight down at us.
Jaxon throws an arm up at the last second and uses his telekinesis to send the bone spinning to the back of the chamber. Then does the same again and again and again, as more and more of the tail starts to fall, faster and faster. Flint and Eden are almost at the front now, where Macy and Xavier are standing just outside the Boneyard, Macy wringing her hands as she watches the carnage unfold.
A neck bone suddenly comes flying at Flint out of nowhere, and Jaxon turns and sends it soaring away.
But the split second it takes to help Flint leaves Jaxon vulnerable, and when the next bone comes flying down—an absolutely massive rib bone—he isn’t fast enough, or strong enough, to stop it.
At the last moment, he shoves me away as hard as he can, and I end up tumbling butt-first into a pile of bones, just as the colossal rib bone crashes into Jaxon and slams him to the ground hard enough to knock him out.
86
Grace Under Fire
“Jaxon!” I scream, scrambling up from the pile of bone shards he knocked me into in order to save me. My hands and arms are scraped to hell, but I barely register that as I race across the distance between us. “Oh my God, Jaxon!”
“Look out,” Hudson snaps, and I pull back just as a giant bone—I’m too close to tell what it is—crashes in front of me and explodes into thousands of fragments that have me dropping the bone and covering my face with my arms.
“Okay, go,” Hudson says when it’s safe again, and I finish the dash to his brother just as another bone comes flying at me. It’s a smaller one, and I brace myself for impact, but it explodes moments before it strikes me.
Bone shards fall everywhere.
Seconds later, the same thing happens to a bone that’s about to fall on Jaxon.
I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t care. As long as bones keep exploding, that means they aren’t landing on one of us, and that is something I can get behind.
I drop to my knees next to Jaxon and start trying to tug the bone off him, but it doesn’t budge. It’s too big, and I’m not strong enough, even when I put my back against it and try to use my legs for leverage.
“Jaxon!” Flint yells and races back toward Jaxon and me.
Mekhi beats him to it—but only by a couple seconds—and then the two of them pick up the bone like it’s nothing and send it flying.
But Jaxon is still out, and when I feel the back of his head, there’s a giant bump there. Huh. Who knew vampires could get concussions?
All around us, bones keep falling in giant, thunderous explosions. I remember watching this documentary once on World War II and how the soldiers suffered PTSD for the rest of their lives from the experience of surviving mortar fire, and now I get it. I really, really get it.
It starts with the sound of something falling from the sky. Then a quick, desperate look up, only to realize that the sky is vast and the sound could be coming from any direction. So you turn, try to identify the source of the sound as it gets louder and louder, only to realize it could actually be coming from the opposite direction you’re looking in and you’ll never even see it before the blast hits you.
The sheer panic of not being able to tell from what direction danger is coming completely steals your ability to even try to save yourself. And in that moment, you feel utterly powerless. Utterly vulnerable. Utterly alone.
Surviving soldiers say they would just run blindly toward what they hoped was safety, never knowing if their next step would be their last.
And now I have an inkling of what they went through, and it is the most terrifying experience of my life because of the total and complete inability to guess where the next hit is coming from.
What happened with Lia was frightening, but this is devastating. Completely soul-crushing.
One after another, bones fall from the cavern ceiling, no rhyme or reason, no pattern, nothing. It’s utter chaos. As each bone slams into a bone pile, fragments fly in all directions, and before long, Mekhi, Flint, and I are cut all to hell.
Still, no bone has fallen on us, so I count it as a win.
But I know it’s only a matter of time. We need to get the fuck out of here—now.
“Can you carry him?” I ask Mekhi. “Just fade to the front of the Boneyard with him over your shoulder?”
“Yeah, of course.”
Mekhi grabs Jaxon and fades toward the front of the Boneyard, while Flint and I both shift. Then we take to the air and race toward the entrance.
“Get moving, Grace!” Hudson growls as another bone comes crashing toward me.
I’m trying, I snap, pushing my wings as hard as I can.
“Try harder,” he snaps back. “Or you’ll die in here.”
Like I don’t know that?
Flint deliberately pulls above me—I think to block me from flying bones, which I hate because it means he’s made himself more vulnerable. That knowledge has me struggling to go faster, and we plow through the air, desperate to get to the exit.
But bones are falling in earnest now, from every direction, and shrapnel is flying up every time a bone crashes to the ground. The noise is deafening, and fear is a metallic taste in my mouth. The need to survive is a visceral tug deep inside me, a desperation that claws at me right beneath my skin.
The fact that there is nothing I can do about it makes everything worse. No choice I can make that might make it better, no path I can try that might lessen the gravity of the danger. I have no choice except to pray that I get out of this alive.
So in the end, I do the only thing I can. I take a deep breath and surrender to the lack of control. Let it beat against my heart like a wild thing. And then I just fly.
Flint drops behind me right at the end, and the two of us shoot through the narrowing entrance of the Boneyard—one after the other. We collapse on the ground near the landing pad—where everyone else is waiting…also on the ground.
I can barely breathe. My heart is about to pound out of my chest, and I’ve never been so exhausted in my life. A glance at Flint, and everyone else, shows they aren’t doing much better.
Jaxon is starting to stir on the ground, thank God, and as soon as I can breathe without coughing, I crawl over to him.
“Are you okay?” I ask, smoothing his hair back from his face.
He shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “Yeah, I think so.” Things must come flooding back, though, because he sits up in a rush. “Are you all right?” He glances around, then demands, “Is eve
ryone okay? What happened?”
“You got hit in the head with a bone the size of a house and passed out,” Mekhi jokes.
Jaxon looks stunned…and also mortified and furious with himself. “I passed out? In the middle of all that? How could I do that to you guys?”
“Umm, you didn’t do anything. You got hurt,” I answer him. “It happens to the best of us.”
“Not to me. It’s my job to protect you.”
“It’s our job to protect one another,” I tell him, waving an arm to encompass everyone.
He looks like he wants to say more, but finally he just shakes his head like he gives up. Which is probably the smartest move at this point, since he’s dealing with six other paranormals—all of whom are used to holding their own in any given situation.
“It’s not that you aren’t a total badass,” I tell him with the best straight face I can manage. “It’s just that we’re all badasses.”
“Amen to that,” Eden says from where she’s slumped next to Mekhi.
“And it’s a good thing,” Xavier says. “Because we’re going to have to do this whole thing again tomorrow.”
“What? Seriously?” Macy rests her head against her drawn-up knees.
“We didn’t get a bone?” Jaxon groans.
“We didn’t get a bone,” Xavier confirms. “Being under fire from a dragon skeleton changed everything really fast.”
“Shit, I had one. I must have dropped it when I fell.” Or maybe it’s when that first bone almost took me out. I can’t remember. All I know is I had a bone and now I very much do not.
Jaxon looks completely embarrassed as he says, “I’m sorry, guys. We dragged you along on this expedition from hell for nothing.”
“First of all, you didn’t drag us along,” Flint says. “We came willingly. So stop beating yourself up. And secondly…” He reaches into his pocket with a wicked grin and pulls out a delicate-looking bone about the length of a pencil. “Toe bones still count as bones, right?”
“Hell yeah, they do!” Eden tells him with a whoop of delight. “You did it!”
“Umm, I think you mean we did it.” Flint shoves the bone back into his pocket for safekeeping, then reaches down and helps Jaxon to his feet. “And not to sound too much like a giant baby, but can I suggest we get the hell out of here before the next we’re-all-gonna-scream-and-die activity begins?”
Macy giggles and says, “I’m with you on that one. Luckily, I’ve already got”—she pulls out her spell book—“a portal back to school ready and waiting. Before we left, I made sure to do the spell that opens up our dorm room as the other side of the portal, remember? Because honestly, I don’t think I could do that dragon ride again, guys.”
“I could literally kiss you, Macy,” Xavier says, and I can tell my cousin has no idea how to reply…even though she is suddenly all smiles.
87
All the Right Moves
I wake up to Macy dancing around the room with her headphones in. She’s still in her pajamas, and I can see a ton of cuts and bruises on her arms and upper back—thank you, Dragon Boneyard—but she looks happy. Really happy, and I don’t blame her.
Last night was terrifying, and I’m feeling pretty glad to be alive, too, even though we’re both running on fumes after—I glance at the clock—only about four hours of sleep. Maybe that’s why, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, I convince her to switch to her phone speaker and then dance around the room with her.
We’re laughing at each other as we shimmy and shake our hips, but it doesn’t even matter because we’re alive…and because we got the dragon bone.
We. Got. The. Dragon. Bone.
That means we’ve got all four things necessary to get Hudson out of my head. I mean, yeah, we still have the Unkillable Beast to get through, but we’re almost there. Why shouldn’t we celebrate?
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hudson interjects from behind me, sitting up and leaning against the wall on my bed. “Because the Unkillable Beast is going to kill you, perhaps?”
“Hush!” I tell him as I collapse next to him, out of breath as the song ends. Macy plops down on her own bed as well. “Don’t be raining on my parade this morning.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” He looks somber, but there’s an underlying note of something in his voice that has me narrowing my eyes.
“You’re happy,” I accuse.
“Excuse me?” Immediately, the tone is gone, replaced by his normal sardonic one.
“You are,” I tell him as surprise courses through me. “You’re actually happy for once.”
He sniffs but doesn’t say anything else, which means I’m right. The knowledge only makes me grin more widely. A happy Hudson can only be a good thing.
“Xavier held my hand last night,” Macy says, and now she’s smiling up at the ceiling she’s been contemplating so hard for the last couple of minutes.
“What?” I shoot up in bed. “When?”
“When we were walking back from the Boneyard.”
“How did I miss that?” I demand. “I was right there, wasn’t I?”
“You were one of the first to go through the portal, with Flint and Jaxon. Xavier and I were walking together at the back and…” She pauses, a dreamy smile coming over her face. “About halfway back to school, he told me to watch out for something in the tunnels and tugged my hand to pull me away. And then he just never let go.”
“Seriously? That’s great. I mean, if you like him?”
“I do, actually.” She rolls over on her bed and hugs her pillow to her chest. “He gives me butterflies. Not like the ‘oh my gosh, the most popular boy in school is in my room’ butterflies, but real butterflies. Because of who he is, not because of what he is.”
“Oh, Macy, that’s awesome. That’s how I feel about Jaxon, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Like it doesn’t matter that he’s this badass vamp. It only matters that he’s Jaxon.”
“You certainly know how to kill a mood, don’t you?” Hudson snarks from where he’s sitting on top of my dresser. “I think I need a dose of insulin after all that sweetness.”
“Bite me,” I answer with a roll of my eyes in his direction, and Macy grins.
“If you keep saying that, one of these days I’m going to take you up on that offer,” he tells me.
“I’ll worry about that after you actually get some teeth,” I shoot back.
“Wow. Looks like you don’t have that problem,” he tells me, all mock hurt. But there’s a glint of amusement in his eyes that he doesn’t even try to hide. “Maybe I’ll borrow some of yours. Sounds like you’ve got plenty of teeth to go around.”
“Yeah, I do.” I snap said teeth at him. “My gargoyle fangs may not be as badass as yours, but they get the job done. You should probably remember that.”
“I remember everything about you,” he tells me, and there’s something in his voice, and his face, that has me turning toward him, wanting to ask…I don’t know what exactly. But definitely something.
“Okay,” Macy says with a groan that breaks the sudden tension between Hudson and me. “Class starts in half an hour, so it’s definitely a glamour day.”
I smile at her, relaxed and happy for the first time in weeks.
At least until Macy sticks her head around the wall that separates the sink from the rest of the room and says, “Don’t forget we have that assembly today.”
“What assembly?” I ask as I reach for my uniform skirt and a purple tank top.
“The one where we get the bloodstone, silly.” She peeks around the wall that separates the bathroom from the rest of the room. “The vampire king wants to do it with all the pomp and circumstance.”
And just like that, my good mood shatters. And so does Hudson’s, if the very British curses he’s tossing out are
any indication…
88
Subconsciously Yours
Several hours later, it’s time for art class, and I can’t help the bounce in my step. I’ve been itching to finish the painting I started when I first got back. I still have no idea where it’s going, but it’s calling to me. And so is the fact that I need a finished product for my midterm grade.
Before I start, I do what I always do. I arrange my tools exactly how I like them, small, fine ones near the front; bigger ones near the back; all the colors of the rainbow right in front of me. And then I start to paint.
At least today I have a picture in my mind of what I want to paint. Before, it was just a desperate drive to get the background colors right. But today…today I have an image. I don’t know where it came from or where I’ve seen it before—or if it’s something from the three and a half months I have no memory of—but wherever it’s from, it’s clear as day. I don’t need answers to the other questions yet. Not when I can simply paint what I see.
And so I do, mixing color after color, shade after shade, until all the variations of blue and gray and black and white combine on the canvas in front of me. I layer the shades carefully, one tiny color distinction after another, until they form a picture so tightly painted that one tone is practically indistinguishable from another. Until trying to get through the painting means unraveling every single shade of every single color.
I work for hours—well after art class is over—until my hands are sore and my shoulders and biceps are on fire. And still I keep going, still I keep painting, layer after layer after layer, until the picture in my head slowly comes to life on the canvas.
Hudson wakes up from a nap in the middle of the painting, and I expect him to argue with me about the right shade of black again.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he just watches me with unfathomable eyes…and an oddly gentle look on his face.