If you haven’t read Destroyer Rising, SPOILERS AHEAD!
GIANT HUGE MASSIVE SPOILERS!
Rattle the Bones
Coming 01/31/2017
CHAPTER ONE
“Of all the things I thought might happen, that wasn’t even close to being one of them.” I stared out the window at the front of Death’s Door, watching Aeros and the swarm of children surrounding him.
Zola patted my shoulder.
I slowly shook my head and marveled at the scene across the street. Aeros had been here less than a week, taking up his post at the corner of the parking lot. He’d intimidated the military patrols, as we’d hoped, but the kids had been a surprise.
A boy slipped as he reached the Old God’s shoulder, and I hissed, expecting to see him smack into the ground. Instead, a pillar of rock rose beneath him, cutting his fall short. Aeros glanced at the boy, and I could see the Old God’s craggy mouth moving.
The boy jumped off, laughing, and joined his friends by the curb. One of the girls made it up to Aeros’s shoulder and swung her legs to hang over his chest. They’d turned the old rock pile into a playground.
“You think he misses Vicky?” I asked.
“We all do, Damian, but she’s with her family again, and her bond to the Destroyer is broken. There’s not much more we can ask than that.”
I agreed wholeheartedly.
A man walked around the corner, dressed in a three-piece suit and bowler.
“Edgar?” I asked, watching him as he walked toward the front door.
“Ah’ve been expecting him,” Zola said. “Took him long enough.”
The bell on the front door jingled a moment later, and Edgar stepped inside.
“Waiting for him to flatten one of those kids?” the Watcher asked.
“You know damn well he would never do that to a child,” Zola snapped.
Edgar held up his hands. “My apologies. I had no intention of starting an argument.”
“Especially when you’ll lose,” I said.
Edgar shot me a sideways glance, but he didn’t deny it. “Are Foster and Aideen around? I’d like to speak with them.”
“It’s barely been a week since they lost Cara,” Zola said.
“Something’s happening in Falias. There’s been fighting inside the city over the past few days, and no one seems to know why.” Edgar hesitated, glancing toward the back of the shop before nodding. “They’re the only Fae I trust right now. The loyalties split between Glenn and Hern are confusing, and judging Fae intentions is little more than a guess.”
“Let me see if Foster and Aideen are up for visitors,” I said to Edgar. I walked toward the back, passing the glass countertops on the right and the large display case of gemstones off to the left. The saloon-style door creaked as I pushed my way past it.
Foster sat on the edge of the grandfather clock beside Aideen, his rage disturbing the ley lines around the clock, sending out sickly black waves from his aura. He had been like this for a week, teetering between rage and guilt, and I felt much the same. Cara shouldn’t have had to lay down her life for mine.
Bubbles and Peanut sniffed the air from where they were both crammed into their underground lair’s entrance.
“You hear all that?” I asked.
“We did,” Aideen said. She turned to Foster and placed a hand on his cheek. “It is time, my love. The seven days are over.”
Foster kissed his wife and slid off the edge of the grandfather clock, exploding into his full size. He sang, and the ringing notes sent shivers down my spine.
Seven days have passed, oh king.
Seven days I’ve seen.
Seven days I held the lost.
Seven days unseen.
Foster slammed the saloon-style doors open, and Aideen joined him. I’d heard the mourning song before. When Cassie died at the farm, something sang it for weeks in the depths of the woods.
In seven moons, the deeds be done,
Sheathed inside the king.
In seven lives, we know the boon,
What now forever sees.
I followed the fairies out into the store. Foster stared at Edgar, and the immortal stared back.
“Did you know?” the fairy whispered. “Did you know what Gwynn Ap Nudd intended to do to my family? My mother?”
“Gods no!” Edgar said, stepping back as if he’d been struck. “There was no hint of it. I’m not even sure he’d intended it himself. He acted when an opportunity presented itself.”
“She wasn’t an opportunity.” Foster bit off each syllable.
Edgar froze, and I stepped between them.
“That’s not what he meant,” I said, holding up my hands. “Foster, please, I don’t want to scrub Edgar’s brains out of the cracks in the hardwood.”
The fairy shifted his eyes from Edgar to me and slowly raised his eyebrows. “That is rather difficult, trying to clean the blood out of those little cracks.”
“Probably worse than armor,” I said, nodding vigorously.
The stony look on Foster’s face relaxed a fraction.
Edgar took his bowler off and ran his finger around the brim. “As much as we argued over the years, I considered Cara a friend. I may have kept some things from you in the past, but never something like this.”
“I need a fight,” Foster said, his voice verging on a growl.
Zola rapped her cane on the hardwood floor. “You’ll have them in spades.”
Foster frowned and glanced at Zola.
Aideen stepped up beside him and laid a hand on his sword arm. “What do you know? Is it Nudd?”
“Edgar can tell you. So long as you don’t stab him, of course.”
The front door opened to the quiet jingle of bells. We all turned to face it.
Frank froze as he stepped inside. “Uh, hope I’m not interrupting.” He held up a bag of White Castle. “I have breakfast.”
Sam blipped through the door behind him. “Yes, we have breakfast.”
A minute later, we were all seated around the old Formica table in the back room. Frank divided up the breakfast sandwiches. He’d bought enough for a small army. Clearly, he knew me.
Foster and Aideen sat to either side of a sandwich in their smaller forms, slicing off bits of bread and egg to build their own miniature breakfast.
“Nice to see you outside the clock,” Sam said.
“The seven days of mourning are a tradition in our family,” Aideen said.
Foster nodded. “She means thanks for not sticking your nose in any more than you did.” He stuffed his face with a bite of his breakfast sandwich.
Sam gave him a small smile.
“Thanks, Frank,” I said after a bite of warm gooey cheese. “But not Sam.”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
Frank nodded and glanced at Edgar.
Edgar wore a frown. He stared at the boxed breakfast sandwich. “This is … food?”
“You’ve never had White Castle?” I said, unable to keep the disbelief from my voice. “Be sure to take it out of the box first. That’s just decoration.”
Zola snorted a laugh beside me, the gray metal charms braided into her hair tinkling as she moved.
“It is square, virtually a cube of meat and cheese…” Edgar took a bite of his sandwich and chewed deliberately. He swallowed, frowned, and took another. He looked uncertain, but his sandwich kept getting smaller.
“Tell us,” Foster said, after finishing one of his mini sandwiches. “What did Zola mean about fights?”
Edgar looked up from his square sandwich and glanced at his watch. He grimaced and said, “It’s time. Turn on your television.”
I hadn’t tried to turn on the little television in the back of the shop in years, and was surprised when the tube whined and came to life. “What station?”
“I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” Edgar said.
A few flips of the dial on the front of the old set proved him right. Every station showed a stand of microphones and a sea of cables running away from the platform. Soldiers in uniform flanked the stage, and my stomach started to sour.
A reporter stepped into the frame. I snorted when I saw who it was.
“Well,” I said. “she sure knows how to step into some shit.” She’d been there when a leviathan rose from the Ohio River, when Ezekiel had executed Watchers along the Brookport Bridge. And yet she was still here, still reporting. I had to give her credit for that.
“This is Emily Beckers, coming to you live. We’re awaiting the first public address of the Fae. Stay with us for this historic moment.”
The light dimmed on the small screen, like a storm front had rolled in front of the sun. As it brightened again, two distinct forms took shape behind the microphones. The feed fell silent, and the cameras zoomed in on the newcomers.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered.
Glenn stood there, one arm raised in greeting to the crowd. He could have passed for a Watcher, wearing a finely tailored suit as he was. The only thing that looked out of the ordinary was the antlered helm he carried beneath his arm.
“Glenn and Hern?” Aideen said.
Foster sat down in the middle of the table and stared. “Hern … what are they doing?”
Sam was stock still on Frank’s lap. “He killed Cara.” Her hands paled as she clenched her fists.
“They’re working together,” I said. “They have to be.”
Foster leaned toward the television, his fingers strangling the hilt of his sword.
“Greetings,” Glenn said, wearing a smile that made him look more like a long-lost grandfather than a murdering psychopath. “I am the leader of the Fae city known as Falias, and yes, some will even go so far as to call me their king. That’s too impersonal a term, as we are here to form an understanding between our communities. So while my given name may be Gwynn Ap Nudd, I implore you to call me Glenn.”
“I think I just threw up a little bit,” Sam said.
“Shh,” Foster said, waving at her to be quiet.
“You lost a great many souls when our fair city was wrenched from its home. Please realize, I lost friends and family too in that great cataclysm. But you must understand, it was not me. It was not even one of the Fae.”
Murmurs filtered through the audience. They hadn’t shown the crowd before, and when the camera panned across them, I was taken aback at the sheer scale, the risers constructed to either side of the stage like some grand stadium. Like some terrible simulacra of the Royal Court.
“Though we of Falias may be powerful, we were not able to stop our shared enemy. In that very conflict, I lost my wife.”
Foster screamed at the television. “You son of a bitch! I’ll gut you from groin to lung just to heal you and start again!”
“Not long ago, your military felt their best course of action was to drop bombs on our fair city, killing more innocent families. Children.” Glenn hung his head and shook it slowly. The camera switched to a horror-struck middle-aged man and a younger woman, maybe his daughter, with one hand over her mouth. Glenn was playing the crowd like a goddamned fiddle. “It was an act of fear, but it is an act I can forgive. By the end of our short speech here, rest assured those bombs that did not find their targets will be returned, undamaged and ready to be deployed at more … appropriate threats.”
A massive green cylinder appeared in front of the podium, looking like a water tower laid on its side and capped with a cone.
Murmurs and shouts rose up from the audience.
“We are only returning what was lost,” Glenn said. He stepped to the side, and for a moment a black-cloaked figure stood hunched behind him, a hood pulled down to cover a helmeted face, and then it was gone.
“That’s a damn daisy cutter that just appeared,” Frank said. “That bomb could kill everyone there.”
Emily stepped onscreen again. “We’re taking you live to an aerial view from our news chopper.”
The image flipped to something I could scarcely wrap my head around.
“What you’re seeing are dozens of unexploded bombs, carefully laid out behind the stage.” Emily turned, and looked to be scanning for someone. “It’s unknown where these bombs came from, but we’re currently speculating that the Fae—”
Someone put their hand up in front of the camera, and the screen flashed back to a stunned-looking newsroom.
I flipped the channel. It was the same on every one.
“Well,” I said. “Glenn knows how to make an impression.”
“Peace,” Glenn said when the picture returned. “There is nothing to fear in this place.” He waited for the crowd to quiet.
Aideen crossed her arms and watched from Zola’s shoulder.
“It was not so long ago that I was at war with one of my allies. This man, here.” He gestured for Hern to step forward. “Our own realm has been scoured by battle, scarred by it. But we have put our differences aside, Hern and I, to work for the betterment of all people.”
The crowd’s murmurs broke into a polite applause.
“So please,” Glenn said, “do not fear us for our differences, but do use caution around the outskirts of our city. There are … bad neighborhoods, much like you have inside your own cities. I would not wish for any of you to be harmed, and it would not do for that to be a reflection on Falias itself.
“Hern will answer your questions about safety, and help guide us into a new era. A time of peace between your realm and our own. An era when our children may play together, grow old together, and bring peace to this fractured world.”
Something in the crowd shifted, and their polite claps broke into a raucous applause, the sound little more than static on the television.
Edgar took a deep breath before slamming his palm on the Formica table. “That was brilliant. That was bloody brilliant. If he plays this right, and I have little doubt he will, Gwynn Ap Nudd will look like an ambassador of goodwill between the commoners and Fae.”
“He’s a monster,” Frank said. He huffed and leaned back in his chair. “Edgar’s right. It was a perfect setup. Too perfect. What’s his game?”
Zola leaned forward and rested her chin on her knuckles. “Keep your opponent off balance, until the time is right.”
Hern stepped up to the microphone. “Thank you, Glenn. As my colleague said, you may ask me whatever you wish. We will be conducting tours of Falias, as I understand many of you would like to meet some of the local Fae who are now your neighbors.”
“It doesn’t even sound like Hern,” Aideen said. “How long? How long have they been planning this?”
“There are dangerous beings from our world. They are not Fae, but please use caution if you would happen to encounter anyone claiming to be a necromancer, vampire, or a witch. It is believed the group responsible for the tragedy in the East is based in Saint Louis. Thank you for your time today.” He inclined his head and walked off the stage.
Zola growled.
“He just put the entire world on alert,” Sam said. “For us.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning the television off. “Shit.”
Edgar rubbed his forehead and turned to Aideen as she hopped onto the table. “There has been more fighting in Falias the past two days. I hoped you or Foster may have some idea of why.”
“Our numbers are building at the Obsidian Inn,” Foster said. “There is more fighting because there is more resistance.”
Aideen wiped down her sword and sheathed it. “What do you wish to do?”
“We go to Falias.” A savage smile lifted the corners of Foster’s mouth.
Pre-order today at iBooks, B&N, and Kobo | Amazon coming 01/31/2017.
