Patricia Briggs - Bone Crossed

Alone, I sat down on the bed and leaned against the cold cement wall. John the Ghost knew more about walkers than I did. I wondered if he'd told the truth: there was a moral code I had to follow to keep my abilities—which now seemed to include some sort of ability to control ghosts. Though, with my indifferent success at it, I suspected it was something that you had to practice to get right.

I tried to figure out how that talent might help me get all of us prisoners out of there safely. I was still fretting when I heard people coming down the stairs: visitors.

I stood up to welcome them.

The visitors were fellow prisoners. And a zombie.

Amber was chattering away about Chad's next softball game as she led Corban, still obviously under thrall to the vampire, and Chad, who was following because there was nothing else for him to do. He had a bruise on the side of his face that he hadn't had when I left him in the dining room.

"Now you get a good night's sleep," she told them. "Jim's going to bed, too, as soon as he gets that fae locked back up where he belongs. We don't want you to be tired when it's time to get up and be doing." She held the door open as if it were something other than a cage—did she think it was a hotel room? Watching the zombie was like watching one of those tapes where they take bits that someone actually said and piece them together to make it sound like they were talking about something else entirely. Sound bites of things Amber would have said came out of the dead woman's mouth with little or no relation to what she was doing.

Corban stumbled in and stopped in the middle of the cage. Chad ran past his mother's animated corpse and stopped, wide-eyed and shaking next to the bed. He was only ten, no matter how much courage he had.

If he survived this, he'd be in therapy for years. Assuming he could find a therapist who'd believe him.

Your mother was a what? Have some Thorazine… Or whatever the newest drug of choice was for the mentally ill.

"Oops," said Amber, manically cheerful. "I almost forgot." She looked around and shook her head sadly.

"Did you do this, Mercy? Char always said that you both suited each other because you were slobs at heart." As she was talking, she gathered up the buckets—though she didn't bother cleaning up the broken one—and stacked most of them where they had been. She took one and put it inside Chad and Corban's cage before removing the used one in the corner. "I'll just take this up and clean it, shall I?"

She locked the door.

"Amber," I said, putting force in my voice. "Give me the key." She was dead, right? Did she have to listen to me, too?

She hesitated. I saw her do it. Then she gave me a bright smile. "Naughty, Mercy. Naughty. You'll be punished for that when I tell Jim."

She took the bucket and whistled when she shut the door. I could hear her whistling all the way up the stairs. I needed more practice, or maybe there was some trick to it.

I bowed my head and waited for Blackwood to bring the oakman back with my arms crossed over my middle and my head turned away from Chad. I ignored it when he rattled the cage to catch my attention.

When Blackwood came in, I didn't want him to find me holding Chad's hand or talking to him or anything.

I didn't think there was a rat's chance in a cattery that Blackwood would let Chad live after everything he'd seen. But I didn't intend to give the vampire any more reason to hurt him. And if I lowered my guard, I'd have a hard time keeping the fear at bay.

After a time, the oakman stumbled in the door in front of Blackwood. He didn't look much better than he had when Blackwood had finished with him. The fae looked a little above four feet tall, though he'd be taller if he were standing straight. His arms and legs were oddly proportioned in subtle ways: legs short and arms overlong. His neck was too short for his broad-foreheaded, strong-jawed head.

He walked right into his cell without struggling, as if he had fought too many times and suffered defeat.

Blackwood locked him in. Then, looking at me, the vampire tossed his key in the air and snatched it back before it hit the ground. "I won't be sending Amber down with keys anymore."

I didn't say anything, and he laughed. "Pout all you want, Mercy. It won't change anything."

Pout? I looked away. I'd show him pout.

He started for the door.

I swallowed my rage and managed to not let it choke me. "So how did you do it?"

Vague questions are harder to ignore than specific ones. They inspire curiosity and make your victim respond even if he wouldn't have talked to you at all otherwise.

"Do what?" he asked.

"Catherine and John," I said. "They aren't like normal ghosts."

He smiled, pleased I'd noticed. "I'd like to claim some sort of supernatural powers," he told me, then laughed because he found himself so funny. He wiped imaginary tears of mirth from his eyes. "But really it is their choice. Catherine is determined to somehow avenge herself upon me. She blames me for ending her reign of terror. John… John loves me. He'll never leave me."

"Did you tell him to kill Chad?" I asked coolly, as if the answer were mere curiosity.

"Ah, now, that is the question." He shrugged. "That's why I need you. No. He ruined my game. If he'd done as I'd told him, you'd have brought yourself here and given yourself to me to spare your friends. He made them run. It took me half the day to find them. They didn't want to come with me—and… Well, you saw my poor Amber."

I didn't want to know. Didn't want to ask the next question. But I needed to know what he'd done to Amber. "What did you eat that let you make zombies?"

"Oh, she's not a zombie," he told me. "I've seen zombies three centuries old that look almost as fresh as a day-old corpse. They're passed down in their families like the treasures they are. I'm afraid I'll have to get rid of Amber's body in a week or so unless I put her in the freezer. But witches need knowledge as well as power—and they're more trouble to keep than they are worth. No. This is something I learned from Carson—I trust Catherine or John told you about Carson. Interesting that one murder left him unable to do anything with his powers, when I—who you'll have to trust when I tell you that I've done much, much worse than a mere larcenous homicide—had no trouble using what I took from him. Perhaps his trouble was psychosomatic, do you think?"

"You told me how you keep Catherine and John," I said. "How are you keeping Amber?"

He smiled at Chad, who was standing as far from his father as he could get. He looked fragile and scared. "She stayed to protect her son." He looked back at me. "Any more questions?"

"Not right now."

"Fine—oh, and I've seen to it that John won't be coming back to visit you anytime soon. And Catherine, I think, is best kept away, too." He closed the door gently behind him. The stairs creaked under his feet as he left.

When he was gone, I said, "Oakman, do you know when the sun goes down?"

The fae, once more sprawled on the cement floor of his cage, turned his head to me. "Yes."

"Will you tell me?"

There was a long pause. "I will tell you."

Corban stumbled forward a step and swayed a little, blinking rapidly. Blackwood had released him.

He took a deep, shaky breath, then turned urgently to Chad and began signing.

"I don't know how much Chad caught of what's going on… too much. Too much. But ignorance might get him killed."

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me—his whole body was focused on his son. When he was finished, Chad—who still was keeping a lot of space between them—began to sign back.

While watching his son's hands, Corban asked me, "How much do you know about vampires? Do we have any chance of getting out of here?"