A Burning in the Bones (Waxways #3)

Chapter 53 Mercy Whitaker

53 MERCY WHITAKER

One of the hounds had Win by the leg.

His screams had transformed. From mourning to pain. A small voice whispered that she should help. Cast a stun spell. Do something! Do anything! But she also knew that if she did that, she would lose her grip on the magic that was illuminating the threads around the room. Would she be able to cast that set of spells again? In all this chaos? It was a split-second decision, but Mercy decided to hold tight to the current spell in the air. Win kicked and screamed and writhed. His outer suit was slowly being shredded. All the layers beneath, too. The hound had sunk its teeth into the meat of his calf. Blood was everywhere.

Dahvid, Margaret, and Redding were trying to hold off the other two hounds. She saw them swinging their weapons in exaggerated arcs to keep them at bay. All while Theo attempted to summon a new barrier. Mercy saw Arakyl gathering himself for another attack. The bright flames churned inside his chest and up his throat. There, the light gathered in a tight sphere before it hurtled across the room.

Theo caught it with his ward—but this time all it took was one blast to shatter the entire thing. He was flung onto his back. Hard. Mercy was about to let go of her own magic and rush to his defense when other figures came streaming past her. Two and then four and then a dozen of them. She saw them as brief slashes of color and movement. Joining the fight so quickly that her mind could not even process who they were. Not until someone strode into her peripheral.

Zell Carrowynd.

The city’s warden was there. The taller woman offered Mercy a tight nod before shouting commands to her squadron of livestone creatures. “Take that first one! Put them down if you must! Get our man out of there and get him out now .”

The tides couldn’t have turned any faster. A gargoyle pinned the nearest dog. The same two panthers she’d seen slinking around the docks as a child were there, too, cornering a second hound. Win limped clear of the fight and Mercy saw that his leg looked like an absolute nightmare. She reached into her pack and tossed him some gauze. Every part of her wanted to go to him. Help treat those wounds, but she knew if she took her focus off the magic it would slip away. Even now she could feel it trying to worm out of her grasp with everything happening around them.

Her eyes swung back to Theo, thinking he still might need help with the shield, but Mercy saw there was yet another figure with them. Theo was sprawled on the ground. A livestone hawk had landed on his chest. Impossibly, Ren Monroe had appeared in the room. There were several odd details that Mercy processed in rapid succession. First, the girl’s face was streaked with tears. Second, the bone-thick bronze thread Mercy had seen before… was connected to Ren Monroe? It linked her and the dragon for some reason—heart to heart. What in the world was that?

There was no time for Mercy to solve the riddle, however, as Ren positioned herself between the dragon and Theo. She raised her horseshoe wand like a sword. A massive ward thundered out. Mercy felt herself knocked back a step by the magic. She watched Ren cast a few more layers and Arakyl’s next blast—which would have been a death blow—caught against the summoning. Ren’s ward didn’t so much as flinch.

There was no celebration or triumphant shout. Instead, Ren quietly set about the task of casting even more layers. Spell after spell spun from the tip of her wand. As easy as breathing. When the girl finished, she turned back to Theo. Mercy couldn’t hear the exchange. Just a few words and then—without any warning—the girl vanished again. Gone as quickly as she’d arrived. Mercy was still staring at the empty air when Zell called out again.

“Who’s in charge here? We need to set up a perimeter!”

Theo was back on his feet, but looked dazed at best. The others had won their respective battles with the help of Zell’s statues. Mercy saw two of the hounds escaping back up the main boring tunnel—a few of the statues in pursuit. Before Mercy could respond to Zell, there was a scream of rage from the houndmaster.

“Enough games! Let us put an end to all of this.”

Mercy felt the hairs on both arms stand up straight. A great surge of power filled the room. Mercy briefly saw all the remaining yellow threads begin to flicker. In that moment, she knew that Arakyl was drawing on the connections. The final secret of his power was being revealed. The threads weren’t simple manipulation threads, which normally allowed magic to flow in one specific direction. The puppeteer could use those threads to feed directives to the puppet. That was how every manipulation spell she’d ever studied worked. Now, however, she watched as Arakyl reversed that magic. “He’s pulling power from them!”

Dahvid was the first to understand what she meant.

“Everyone to me!” he shouted. “Now!”

The image-bearer backtracked so that Win was just a few paces away from him. The rest of the crew obeyed. Even Zell Carrowynd and her statues edged as close as they possibly could. The dragon was raising its head. The backlit eyes stared at them through the slight distortions of the shield. When everyone was close enough, Dahvid swiped the tattoo on his exposed shoulder: a set of concentric gold rings. Magic whispered past and through her. A golden sphere circled a golden sphere circled a golden sphere—and all of them inside that protection. The world outside went silent. Mercy realized that the whispers that had been needling at every thought, filling the space between every noise, were also gone. Dahvid had somehow sealed them off from everything.

Just in time. Arakyl unleashed an attack unlike anything so far. Everything in the room was pulverized . The shield Monroe had summoned smashed into bits. The houndmaster was flung like a rag doll across the room. Two of the livestone statues—the panthers—had been returning from the main tunnel. Zell let out a too-late cry of warning as both of them melted into nothing. Dusted in seconds. Only Dahvid’s golden shields held. And barely at that. Arakyl’s spell bent the golden magic inward, denting on all sides, before passing through the rest of the chamber.

Dahvid said, “This spell will hold for thirty seconds. We need to organize.”

Zell Carrowynd’s chest was heaving. The woman was staring out as if two members of her family had just perished—rather than statues. Theo noticed too. “Their sacrifice will not be forgotten,” he said. “Zell. Thank you. You saved us. How’d you know that we were here?”

After a long beat, she turned back to them. “I didn’t. The statues sensed a threat to the city weeks ago. We followed the trail up to Running Hills first—and then traced it to here.”

Theo nodded. “Lucky for us. Thanks again.”

“We’re glad to have you,” Mercy agreed, eager to catch the woman up. “There’s a manipulation spell linking this dragon and the Makers. Hundreds of them are acting on his behalf. I also think these threads are fueling this awakening. He’s pulling power from them. Severing the threads will free people back in the city and cut Arakyl off from his source of power. We’ve already started the process of cutting those threads. You can see what’s left. Hanging in the air.”

Zell glanced up, nodded. “We have to destroy all of these?”

“Just the yellow ones,” Mercy replied. “But there’s still a lot to do. We need someone to tend to Win. We’re also going to need a new shield when this one falls. Everyone else is on the threads. Locate, confirm, destroy. Don’t cut any of the other threads….”

“There is one other that I need to destroy.” This came from Theo. All attention swung in his direction. “The bronze one. Right there. Ren told me it needs to be cut too.”

Mercy had seen the girl appear. She had a dozen questions about that—and a dozen more questions about the bronze thread that she’d seen connecting the girl to the dragon. It clearly wasn’t the same as the others. Ren wasn’t being manipulated, but then what was their bond? Her curiosity would have to wait, though. None of those questions would matter if they didn’t do what needed to be done to survive the next thirty seconds.

“Then we cut that one too,” she finally said. “Let’s get ready.”

Everyone moved at the same time. The golden sphere was a tight space, which made it slightly awkward, but all of them fell to the necessary tasks. Zell knelt down beside Win. There was a mixture of grieving and pain in the noises he made. Mercy had been so focused on surviving that she hadn’t thought about the fact that Guion was dead. Her fingers itched as she glanced over at his mound of a body. The pain in her right foot flared too. There was a brief internal debate and then Mercy remembered she couldn’t perform any other magic. Not without losing her grasp on the visualization spells.

Theo and Redding were huddling together to create a new shield. Margaret had her null blade up and ready. Dahvid was tightening his grip on his own sword. The golden sphere flickered. Zell finished wrapping Win’s leg and turned back just as the golden barrier vanished. Mercy expected a barrage. Gouts of bright flame. Instead, they were left in darkness. Only the threads glowing in the air around them. It was just enough light to see the dragon’s massive corpse.

The light that had been glowing in the dragon’s eyes was gone. Mercy frowned. Was it over? Had the dragon pulled too much power from the Makers and burned his final bridge to this world? No, this was something else. Her thoughts went back to Beacon House. She’d seen Nance when he was occupied by the dragon. How he resisted every spell. How his eyes had changed colors at the last moment, when Arakyl had abandoned him to occupy the viceroy’s mind instead. It took that chain of thoughts for her to understand what she was looking at now.

“He’s not here. He’s elsewhere! We need to get moving. Now !”

No one needed to be told twice. Everyone moved with haste. It didn’t take long for them to build a sort of rhythm. Working around the room. Finding threads. Calling them out. Letting Dahvid and Margaret hack away at them with great sweeping blows. Theo and Redding helped with the identification, both of them waiting patiently to cast the ward when the time came. It didn’t take them long to finish one section of the room and move on to the next one. Finally, it felt as if they were actually progressing. They’d severed some fifty threads when Theo looked up sharply. His face twisted in anguish. Mercy thought that Arakyl might be manipulating him. Whispering into his mind and showing him things that were not real. Instead, she noticed that the bronze thread had started burning brighter than the rest. Almost too bright to look at straight on. When Theo spoke, a chill ran down Mercy’s spine.

“Oh gods. She’s going to kill them all.”