The Mortal Bone Read Free Page B

keep him ignorant of his true, immortal nature.
    Byron was no ordinary teenager. I was no ordinary woman. Grant was probably the most human of us all, but even he wasn’t from this world.
    Our little family. Crazy and wonderful. And that was even without Zee and the boys.
    Byron grabbed some bags, and I took the rest. Looked like vegetables and fruit, and baking materials. I spotted a lot of frozen dinners, too, along with motor oil, a dozen bottles of rubbing alcohol, and about that many family-sized bags of M&Ms. Good eats.
    We lumbered to the house. Grant sat on the porch, staring at the crystal skull. I had set it out on a chair, nestled on a tattered red cushion. Johnny Cash still rumbled, this time about the apocalypse—which seemed incredibly appropriate.
    Byron paused, staring at the skull. “Wow.”
    “Yes, wow,” Grant muttered, and gave me a piercing look.
    I shook my head and went into the house just long enough to dump the grocery bags and put away the frozen dinners. Byron opened the cabinets, unloading rice and cans. I patted his shoulder on my way out, and he only flinched a little. It wasn’t personal. He still had trouble, sometimes, being touched.
    Outside, I found Grant sprawled in his chair, staring at the hill where my mother and grandfather were buried. He was humming beneath his breath, less a melody than a rumble, less music than power. His flute was in the house, but he’d been using it less, learning instead how to rely on his own voice to twist at the threads of energy around him.
    “What’s the verdict?” I asked him.
    “Who brought it?” he replied, instead of answering my question.
    “A possessed woman. Terrified. She said that she was . . . ordered. In a dream.”
    “That makes me feel so much better.”
    I snorted and leaned against the rail. “It’s not shaped like a human skull.”
    “No,” he said softly, “it’s certainly not.”
    The cranium was wide, with three ridges across the brow and a similar protruding crest at the cheeks. The eye sockets were huge, and the carved jaw thick. The upper and lower rows of teeth were sharp as dagger points, jutting at odd, uneven angles that reminded me of a piranha’s mouth.
    It should have been ridiculous. But it wasn’t.
    It was disturbing as hell.
    My first view of the skull, out in the driveway, had been too quick. I had not appreciated, then, just how unsettling it really was—but I’d been sitting with the thing for over an hour, and it was pretty much getting on my last nerve.
    “I assume you’ve heard of crystal skulls,” Grant said.
    “New Age bunk,” I replied. “Signs of alien life. Hosts of supernatural powers. Ancient computers. I spent a lot of late nights watching bad hotel television before I met you.”
    His mouth twitched. “Pre-Columbian fakes. At least, that’s what one camp says, while others believe . . . well, everything you just said.”
    “Uh-huh,” I said, rubbing my tattooed arms, soothing the boys. “But I bet demons didn’t deliver up those skulls in a bowling bag and red pickup truck.”
    “No, you’re special,” he replied dryly. “This skull, sweetheart, isn’t from earth.”

CHAPTER 3
    A lot of things weren’t from earth. Including humans.
    Life had been a lot easier before that little discovery, which I tried not to think about all too often, given that it involved genocide and quantum highways, and aliens that could—and did—manipulate human DNA like it was nothing but silly putty. Those same aliens had imprisoned five demons on my ancestor’s body in an attempt to stop a war, and those same aliens had played God on this earth and on other worlds, creating monsters, becoming monsters, using humans as a living dolls in games meant to ease the burden and boredom of being immortal.
    They were called the Aetar, or Avatars, and only one—that I knew of—still resided on earth. The rest had been gone for thousands of years, off to other worlds accessible through a network of