A Burning in the Bones (Waxways #3)

Chapter 57 Mercy Whitaker

57 MERCY WHITAKER

Mercy counted to one hundred. When she reached that number, she crawled out of her hiding place. Brushed off the dirt and the debris and began the descent once more. Quiet as a field mouse, she maneuvered through the snaking tunnel. A glance confirmed that Arakyl had returned to his original position. His diamond-shaped head was slumped back on the stones. All around him was carnage. No one from her party had been spared. Death and death and more death. Normally, she would mourn them. Whisper a quiet apology for those who’d passed on to the next world.

Instead, Mercy removed her gloves.

It always felt so lovely. The open-air breathing across her knuckles. Sometimes, she went an entire day without taking them off. As a student, she only ever removed them in the privacy of her own room. And the handful of times she made love to Devlin. Gods, she’d always been so afraid of what he would think. After they’d been together for a while, he finally was bold enough to ask her. What had happened to her fingers? She told him she’d been born that way. Buried the truth inside another truth. That way no one would ever see the real Mercy.

Now, she stretched both hands. Attempted to splay her fingers out. The two dead ones on her right hand refused to cooperate. Her pinky and ring finger. Both were the black of ashes. Dark stubs that were shorter than her other two fingers, because they had not grown since the incident. No blood pumped through them. The nails had fallen off and never returned. Mercy had also discovered there was no way to be rid of them. They could not be severed with a blade. The fingers were permanent, because they’d come from a curse.

This was her secret.

One summer, her family had visited her aunt’s farm. Well south of Kathor. She’d snuck out at night with her two cousins. All of them younger than ten. There was a pond on the property. Back through the woods. They fancied a midnight swim and so they took turns watching for the adults. Keeping an eye on the trail that fed through the woods. Mercy had backtracked, just to see if any of the house’s lights were on, when she heard stillness. A dreaded quiet.

One of her cousins had swum too far down. At the bottom of the pool, he’d accidentally stirred a nest of slipsnakes. They’d wrapped around him. His arms and his legs. Pulled him down to the bottom. When he didn’t surface, his brother dove after him. For every snake he ripped off his brother, another wrapped around his own limbs. Mercy didn’t know what had happened, but when she sprinted back to the pond’s edge, she found them both floating facedown.

Her first instinct was to rescue them.

It took all her strength to drag their bodies back to the muddy bank and flip them over. She tried everything she’d ever heard adults talk about. Breathing into their mouths. Pumping her hands down against their bird-thin chests. Nothing worked. Desperate, she’d grabbed one cousin by the collar and started shaking him. Unleashing screams that were full of anger and fear and fury. Magic came pouring out of her. Wild and reckless and free.

It was the first spell she’d ever performed. Easier the second time. All she had to do was call on that waiting magic and pull him back from wherever he had gone. She didn’t piece it together then. The truth of what she’d done. All she knew was that she had to save them. Both of her cousins returned from the dead. Just like that. And that’s when the pain came.

Mercy screamed as something bit down hard on her hand. A searing, hot-white sort of pain. She thought that the snakes had surfaced. Maybe one was clamped down on her hand. But when she looked, she saw that two of her fingers had withered. From pale white to a dead black.

Her cousins weren’t great witnesses. Mercy told her parents what happened, but they couldn’t confirm the details. Her insistence on the true story—that she had brought the boys back to life with magic—only seemed to bother her aunt. The adults were quick to shut her up. Repeatedly told her not to tell that story, even though she’d been taught her whole life not to lie. It was as if she’d done some unthinkable thing. Something to hide. Rather than saving two boys from dying. They never went back to visit her aunt’s house again. Her boys, Mercy heard, became outcasts in that town. Rumors had spread. No one could believe that they were normal. Her aunt seemed to be waiting for some dark power to manifest in them. As if they were more revenant than human. It took Mercy a very long time to understand the truth of what had happened.

She had performed an exchange .

Life traded for death. She could resurrect someone, but only if she offered some small part of herself in the trade. Something of hers had to die. Her first thought had been of power. And what little girl wouldn’t think that way? She fancied herself as a potential hero. Imagined all the ways she might help people. She even spent time in the library, secretly reading about necromancers. There were dozens of examples in Kathor’s history, but she discovered that what she had done was incredibly rare. Bringing a person fully back to life without curse or consequence? There had been necromancers who could raise the mindless dead to do their bidding. Others she read about could allow a loved one to have one final conversation with the departed. But there were almost no instances of someone dying and coming back to life exactly as they had been.

Mercy’s magic was an exception.

All the thrill vanished, though, when she remembered the cost. Every time she saved someone, a part of her would die. And she had no way of predicting which part. Her fingers had withered during that first incident. One for each cousin. She already felt self-conscious about the way they looked. Other children stared when they noticed them. What would the magic demand next? Her bright red hair? Her vision or her hearing? Even worse, Mercy could imagine what might happen if others learned of her gift. People would be knocking on their door day and night. Begging for her to restore this child or that husband or this sister. How could she ever choose who should return? Didn’t hundreds of people die in their city every day? And how long before the exchange claimed some part of her that she could not live without?

Mercy learned to hide her power instead. Always wearing her special-made gloves. Never mentioning the story about her cousins. She didn’t use the gift again until she was a sophomore at Balmerick. One of her friends overdosed on a bad batch of the breath. They found him unresponsive in his bed. As other students sent for the medics, Mercy slipped into his room. She worried that it had been too long since she first performed the magic. That she might not remember how to do it. But the spell came naturally. Like breathing.

She resurrected him. This time it cost her an organ. Mercy felt her appendix rupture just seconds after he gasped back to life. When she checked in at Safe Harbor to be treated, the doctors told her that her appendix had not simply burst, as it did in most cases. Instead, the organ seemed to have withered into a husk inside her. It was the trade again. Life for death. Mercy studied each event closely. It seemed to her that the magic was choosing less crucial parts to kill. Two of her smaller fingers. An organ with very little functionality. She wondered then. If she used the gift a dozen more times, maybe she wouldn’t lose anything that mattered.

But what if she was wrong? What if her heart burst next? There was no way to know. No way to test out the hypothesis without inviting greater risks. Guilt pushed Mercy to switch majors. From structural magic to anatomical. If she could not use her gift to save people, she would find some other way to help them. At least that was the idea. Nothing completely absolved her from that hidden shame.

During Mercy’s senior year, her grandmother passed away. She’d always assumed that her parents had dismissed and forgotten about her gift as the imagined claims of a little girl. Yes, there was the strange incident with the cousins. And of course, they’d heard about the situation at Balmerick. But Mercy hadn’t bothered to tell them the truth that time around. Which made it all the more surprising when her mother came to her before the funeral.

“I want you to bring her back.”

Mercy had been too shocked to reply. Her mother accused her of playing dumb—and then of being selfish. When Mercy explained how the gift worked, her mother had pressed on gracelessly.

“Maybe it won’t be bad this time,” she said. “Since you’re doing me a favor. Maybe the magic will just take your eyelashes. You can live without eyelashes.”

“Yes, I could,” Mercy replied softly. “But what if my eardrums rupture and I can never hear anything ever again? What if a capillary in my heart bursts?! Grandmother lived her life. She was a good woman and it is time for us to mourn her.”

She didn’t say: If I bring her back, won’t she just die again? It was not like her cousins or her friend from school. This wasn’t a person who had an entire lifetime stolen from them. The argument broke their relationship. Her mother seemed incapable of seeing the danger of what she was asking. Nor could Mercy see—at the time—how desperate grief can make a person. How it consumes their better judgment and forces them to demand the unthinkable.

No one else ever knew about her gift. Devlin had come the closest to finding out. When she started falling in love with him, imagining how their courtship might one day be a marriage, she’d nearly come out and told him everything. Countless times. The memory of her mother’s scorn had always stopped her at the very last second.

Working at a hospital should have pressed her right up against the discomfort—but it hadn’t. Every patient she lost during her training had been elderly. Or else they suffered from a disease that, if she resurrected them, would only kill them a few months later. She knew she would have used her gift if a child had died at the hospital. Some accident that grated against her sense of fairness. But years passed at Safe Harbor without any such incidents.

She didn’t consider using her power again until Devlin. What a catastrophe that had been. Mercy had already made up her mind about it. She would get him back to Safe Harbor. If the antidote saved him, all the better. If it didn’t, then she would have intervened. Sacrificed some small part of herself to keep him in the waking world. Fate had laughed at her good intentions. Devlin took his last breath just before she’d reached for the candle. Everyone knew the dead could not travel. A body couldn’t port, because when a person died, the magic inside them ceased as well. Mercy had teleported away and in that split second she had also lost her chance to bring him back.

“Not again.”

The dead waited for her. As always, she could sense them. Spirits hovering near their bodies. As watchful ghosts or potential revenants. A soul always tarried. It waited to make sure it wasn’t needed, perhaps. Or maybe the soul needed to say goodbye to the body? She wasn’t sure. But she had felt it with the bonded couple at Beacon House. The husband who’d passed away. His spirit had been tormented even more by his wife’s anguish. The bond magic that had connected them. Mercy couldn’t stand the way that had felt—and so she had intervened. Pretended to do some basic spell while activating magic only she possessed. Now she would do it again.

The souls in the cavern remained in agitation. The closest body to the entry ramp was Guion’s. Mercy took a deep breath before kneeling down beside him. She set one hand above his unbeating heart—and then her spell began. There was a brief hitch, as if the magic was waking up, stretching its limbs. But then she felt the exchange. Life trading places with death.

Guion came gasping back to her. The resurrected always had a wild-eyed look to them. Lost and found all at the same time. “Mercy?” he croaked. “What… oh gods… what happened?”

She ignored his questions. It was easier to ignore that than the sudden itch spreading across her scalp. Slowly, her hair began to fall to the ground. A very small and very vain part of her hated that it had to be her hair. The bright red locks that she’d always loved so much. A more logical part of her understood this was good . Better hair than her frontal lobe. Rose-red strands fell to the floor as she walked. Great clumps tumbled down. Before Guion could say anything, she knelt down beside his brother—Win. These wounds were more substantial. Mercy suspected that wouldn’t matter.

She placed one hand over his heart.

Come back to me .

He did. The great wounds across his chest puckered shut. When he saw his brother walking toward him, he began weeping. Such an impossible thing. She hoped they would wrestle with the impossibility for years to come. Mercy crossed the room. As she went, she felt a sharpness in her jaw. The taste of blood. Reaching up, she pulled an incisor that looked rotten all the way through. Bone blackened by the curse. She tossed the tooth onto the floor.

Margaret came next. The young girl came back more violently than the others. She woke up screaming. The terrors of life and death still tumbling her like a stone in a river. Mercy gestured for Win and Guion to take care of her before moving on to the next corpse. Both of them looked shocked. Really, they looked scared. They’d finally realized what she was doing. Finally understood where they had been just moments before, and the impossibility of where they were now.

Mercy’s entire right calf seized with enormous pain. The muscle was dead. It was a struggle to stay upright. But she had a good leg. She shifted her weight to it, set one hand on the nearby wall, and limped onward. An absent muscle would change the rest of her life, but she would trade it a thousand times over for Margaret. Next up was Zell. She felt the others watching her and knew this was what her life would have been if she had ever revealed her gift. If anyone had ever learned the truth. Did they think of her as something unnatural? Would they think of themselves that way? It didn’t matter. Not really. In a way, they were revenants. She’d brought them back for a specific purpose. She knew she needed all of them to finish this.

Zell returned with a look of pure calm on her face. As if she’d simply dozed off in her bed and was being woken by a roommate who was eager to get to class on time. Mercy finally felt pain that couldn’t be ignored. Her right eye ruptured . It felt as if someone had lined up a knife and carefully pushed it into her pupil. Warmth gushed down that side of her face and she dropped to a knee. Zell rushed to her side.

“What the hell? Mercy? What the hell is going on?”

She shoved back to her feet. Away from the other woman.

“Get them ready,” she said. “Everyone get ready!”

One eye still worked. Mercy’s head spun with the pain, but she grunted once and started across the room. Dahvid Tin’Vori’s body lay slack across the stones. He was as pretty in death as he was in life. For the first time, Mercy hesitated.

Hair then a tooth then a muscle… and now an eye? Is it getting worse each time? She couldn’t help the tremor of fear that ran through her. No one would fault her for stopping now. She’d already done the impossible. And these next three resurrections could keep ramping up. Was death angry with her? Was it, even now, preparing to punish the next theft she committed? Mercy realized she was crying.

“Keep going,” she whispered to herself. “Finish what you’ve started.”

With a hand on his heart, Mercy brought Dahvid back. She prayed that it would be an eyebrow or an earlobe or another tooth. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe fate heard her. Mercy’s left eye burst. The darkness came with terrible swiftness. A vast and all-consuming void.

Dahvid actually caught her. Dead one moment and the swooning hero the next. Mercy almost wanted to laugh, because as strong and fine as his arms felt, she knew she was probably bleeding all over him. Dahvid didn’t ask questions. He didn’t demand explanations like the others. Mercy realized it was because he’d known this would happen. Somehow. He’d seen this.

“I have you,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I have you.”

Magic curled into the air. Dahvid must have swiped one of his tattoos. Mercy could feel it trying to reach her—and failing. “I’m… I’m not sure. I’m trying to heal you….”

“It can’t be healed,” she whispered back. “These aren’t ordinary wounds. Please. Just take me over to Redding. Guide me there. Please, Dahvid.”

“Take you to…”

“Now.”

Her voice didn’t leave room for argument. He slid one arm beneath her and guided her through that darkness. She was in too much pain to think through the rest of her life. What this meant for her future. All that mattered was here . All that mattered was now .

“Redding is in front of you.”

“Guide my right hand to his heart.”

Dahvid obeyed her. Mercy repeated the spell again. Damn the consequences. There was a satisfying gasp as the pioneer returned to them. Dahvid’s voice was low. Near her ear.

“Your fingers…”

“I’ll be fine,” Mercy replied. “I’ll be just fine. Take me to Theo.”

He was the last one. Dahvid positioned her again. Accepting that she might die this time, Mercy leaned down and performed the final exchange. She waited for the feeling to come. A burn in her throat. A slice across the abdomen or in her heart or down her spine. Nothing. Did it not work?

And then she heard Theo’s voice.

“I don’t… what the hell is going on? What happened?”

Mercy straightened. She could not see any of them. She couldn’t see herself. The pain pressed in, threatening to shut her mind down, to let her slip into unconsciousness. She could not allow that. Instead, she pushed the pain aside and cleared her throat.

“I brought you back,” she said. “Do not waste this. I swear to every god that has ever existed—if any of you die again in this chamber, I will find your soul in the afterlife and kill you a second time. Arakyl thinks you’re all dead. His attention is focused elsewhere right now. This is our chance. I am going to cast the visualization spells. My tools… someone can borrow my tools. Margaret, get the null sword. Dahvid, summon your weapon. We need to move with haste.”

She shoved Dahvid away from her and nearly collapsed.

Gods, I feel like death.

That thought almost had her laughing. Almost. Mercy began the familiar steps of the spell. Even without her sight, she knew what she was doing. How to control the magic. She could hear the others whispering. There was no time for more explanations. She focused on finishing the casting.

It worked.

She knew it worked—and began weeping uncontrollably, because even though she could not see Dahvid or Theo or the dragon corpse—she could see the magic. Every remaining thread appeared in that darkness. It was an unexpected, overwhelming gift. Mercy looked up at those bright colors and gave the others a final command.

“Finish what I started.”

And then she was falling through the earth itself.