Bones and Heart Read Free

fashion sense wavered between ’70s rocker chick and Dickensian waif, and, tonight, she wore a little dress of crepe-brown silk. With her auburn hair in waves past her shoulders, she appeared deceptively mortal.
    “I can’t taste anything.” Jack examined an ornate pastry. “Is the tiara necessary?”
    She primly adjusted the delicate diamond crown on her head. “This is an expensive place. It’s owned by one of ours. You couldn’t have dressed up?”
    “I don’t do tuxes.” He set his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Did she tell you we’d be picking up Grindylow?”
    “You think I’d have come if she had?” Phouka selected a beignet and looked around. “I love places like this. They’re so civilized.”
    “I’m not driving back to New York with three goddamn Grindylow in a rental car. We rode the shadow here. We’re riding it back.”
    “They can ride the shadow too. I know how to bind them to us.”
    Jack sat back. “How are they made?”
    “You really want to know?”
    “I really want to know.”
    “Alchemy. Necromancy. Shall I go into detail?”
    “Never mind.” He wished he hadn’t asked. He set down his cup of tea so that it wouldn’t shatter in his tightening grip. “And how long has Mr. Bones been creating his horrors?”
    “Ever since he and a queen of air and darkness hooked up. He built them. She animated them. I believe that was somewhere in Babylon. I know he’s Etruscan.”
    “So.” Jack lowered his gaze through his eyelashes. “A long time then.”
THE PAST
    Jack stood outside the gates of the abandoned London mansion that had, in minutes, transformed into a splendid estate. The occasional passerby didn’t even glance at it as the glamour pooled up the mansion’s stairs, over the walls, stainingeverything with newness. The windows glowed with lamps. Music drifted on the mist-webbed air.
    Someone called his name from within the fog drifting along the gas-lit street. Jack glimpsed a crimson coat. Reluctantly turning his back on the fairy mansion, he strode toward whatever had called to him, gripping the silver dagger in his coat pocket.
    The hooded figure in crimson fled. He loped after it.
    When he saw it again, it stood on the balcony of the upscale town house where his father had exorcised the nasty spirit from the blond girl. As he looked up at the living doll, it turned and disappeared through the French doors.
    Jack grabbed a drainpipe and began climbing, a trick he’d learned from a friend who’d been a chimney sweep. He clambered over the railing. The French doors were ajar and he stepped cautiously through.
    He saw red . . . red everywhere, over the walls, the floor, the bed. . . . He wanted to be sick, but couldn’t—the life-size doll was crouched beside the blond girl and it held . . . it held . . .
    The heart torn from the girl’s chest pulsed once, strands of blood pooling from it, onto the floor near the doll’s crimson skirt.
    He yanked out the dagger and launched himself at the doll. It glided up and went for him, the lower half of its face unhinging to reveal a mouthful of teeth. He slammed the dagger into its left eye, shattering half the face, revealing a skull beneath.
    Something struck the back of his head. He fell to his hands and knees. As he sank down toward the floor, a pair of booted feet moved into his line of sight. A silhouette with pale hair crouched before him. It said, in the exact same voice that Jack’s father had exorcised from the blond girl, “Good try, boy. Very brave. Just how she likes ’em.”
    Jack’s world went dark.
THE PRESENT
    Without Phouka, Jack slunk into the humid New Orleans night and found his way back to the secret, overgrown street in the French Quarter.
    After over a century, he knew the habits to which the Fatas adhered like clockwork.When the timepiece in his pocket clicked midnight, the doors to Lacroix’s house opened and the Fata emerged in his human guise. A silver Rolls-Royce pulled up to the