Bones and Heart Read Free Page A

curb and Lacroix got in.
    As the car drove away, Jack tugged on a pair of leather gloves. There would be sentinels in Lacroix’s lair. He grinned in anticipation.
    Rarely did anyone expect a thief to come through the front door, so he picked the lock and stepped into the crimson foyer. The eyes of the taxidermy crocs gleamed. Something giggled and scampered at the hall’s end. Although Jack could see in the dark, he palmed a flashlight and switched it on because electric light made reality clearer. As he passed the onyx mirror, he glimpsed something swimming up out of its depths, but he knew better than to look.
    The first sentinel—a pillar that morphed into a hoof-footed girl—turned its wooden head to regard him with blank eyes. As its clawed hands reached for him, Jack slammed a silver knife into its breast. The sentinel once again became a thing of wood.
    In the center of the round salon, he took from around his neck a bronze pendant shaped like a fly. He snapped the pendant from the chain, whispered to it. The bronze fly clicked to false life and glided into the darkness of the house. He followed it up a curving flight of stairs. The second sentinel—the shadow thing in a child’s nightgown—ran at him out of the dark, revealing a grotesque face with too many teeth.
    Jack waited until it was close enough, then pulled two silver needles from his knotted hair and stabbed them into the sentinel’s chest. It snarled, biting at him. He pinned it, kicking, to the wall.
    The bronze fly was crawling through the keyhole of a black metal door. If Jack had had a heart, it would have been battering at his rib cage.
    A whisper behind him made him spin around as he snapped out a fan of mirrors in his left hand.
    The Grindylow bride in its veil and white satin gown confronted its reflection in the mirror fan and stood completely still. Jack backed away, pushed open the metal door, stepped in, and locked it between him and the bride.
    He turned to face a laboratory beneath fluorescent lighting—low doses of electricity were fine in Fata lairs, something they could produce by flickering in and out of reality. The walls were crisscrossed with shelves of jewel-hued bottlesfilled with glowing orbs, sealed with wax and sigils. There were two tables. Lain upon each was a life-size doll, ball-jointed, vulnerable, and grotesquely beautiful.
    Slouched in one corner, like a discarded toy in a red gown mottled with age, was an antique Grindylow, half of its bisque face caved in to reveal the yellowed skull beneath.
    Lacroix had kept her, all these years.
THE PAST
    Jack awoke in the dark with a dead girl on the floor beside him. The pale-haired shadow and the horrifying doll-thing had vanished. He heard only the whisper of mice in the walls, the staccato drum of a horse’s hooves on the street below the balcony.
    He scrambled up and stifled a cry as he set one hand in sticky liquid. He could smell it, the blood. Nausea crippled him for a few staggering seconds.
    He pushed out onto the balcony. He almost fell on the climb down, but dragged himself to his feet. As he ran in the direction of the inn and his father, dizziness from his head injury made him reel. The world of night and fog became a blur. No. Don’t let me fall.
    A strong arm slid around him, kept him upright. A young man’s voice said, “Tell me where you want to go.”
    The stranger slung one of Jack’s arms over his shoulders and guided him the three blocks to the Black Lamb Inn. Despite the fog, Jack glimpsed his rescuer’s tangled brown hair and a face that might have come from a Renaissance painting.
    “I’m Jack.” Jack bit down on his lip, fighting another urge to be sick.
    “That’s your true name? God. No wonder they thought it was amusing. You need to leave London, Jack. They’ve noticed you.”
    “ They. Demons . . .” Jack spat. “Fairies.”
    “Some might use those words—if they want a bad end.”
    “Are you one of them?”
    The young man met