Bone Crier's Moon (Bone Grace #1)(61)

Another person climbs up the cliff on my right. She hefts herself up onto the grass and stands. I tense to attack, but I don’t see any chains.

“Help!” She clutches the loose-fitting gown over her stomach and runs to me. “They won’t let me see my baby.” Translucent tears spill down her cheek. “I need to go back. I didn’t even get to hold him.”

My heart squeezes. She must have died in childbirth. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you back your life.”

“Please.” She falls to her knees.

A broad-shouldered man races toward me from behind. I’ve no idea where he came from. He’s wearing a chain-clad uniform. A soldier, trained to fight.

“I killed in the name of my king!” he shouts. “You can’t drag me to Hell!”

“If the gods marked you with those chains, you must have lusted for your kills.”

He lunges for me with a savage growl. I pull back from the woman, but she catches my skirt. I’m knocked off balance, and the man cuffs my jaw. I gasp with a bright shock of pain. He grabs my arms and slings me across the ground. I roll to the edge of the cliff.

“Ailesse!”

My heart kicks. Bastien. He sounds concerned. I want none of it.

I jump back up and duck another punch from the Chained. I barrel into his chest and push him to the brink of the cliff. His feet dig into the chalky dirt. Pebbles skid off the edge. He seizes my shoulders and shoves against me. He’s strong, but not as strong as my tiger shark. I can drive him over the edge. But if I do, he might pull me with him.

I wrest one of my arms away. I yank Marcel’s knife from my sash. With a cry of exertion, I stab the soldier in the chest. His eyes bulge in pain. If he were alive, this would be a killing blow.

It’s how I would have killed Bastien on the ritual bridge.

I swallow the bile scalding my throat. This isn’t murder.

Like my rite of passage would have been.

Another cry escapes me, this one mangled with rage. I stab the Chained again, but he only grips me harder. I keep stabbing, keep screaming. I fight to control my betraying thoughts—the image of Bastien if I’d done this to him.

No blood spills from the Chained, although my blade plunges deep. I’m hurting him, but not disabling him.

“Let her go!” the Unchained woman shouts, and rushes at him. “I need her to—”

I gasp as the soldier flings her over the edge, but I can’t pause to feel pity. While he’s distracted, I jerk away and swivel out of his hold. I whip my leg out and swing back for him. My kick strikes like a hammer, and he’s thrust off the cliff.

I’ve barely turned around when the next person confronts me. She doesn’t glow with chazoure. She’s alive.

I slash my knife through the air between us, a warning. I’m all too aware she can bleed. “Don’t interfere, Jules.”

“With what?” she demands, but her wide eyes dart around us. “What are those voices? What are you fighting against?”

She knows—I told all my captors in the catacombs—but she’s still unbelieving. “The dead.”

She swallows and looks over the cliff, keeping as far back from the edge as she can. Jules doesn’t have the vision to perceive the chazoure of the souls, but she can hear their raging screams and see thirty-four women below battling an invisible army.

I scan past her while she’s stunned. A faint and deadly glow shines fifty yards away, limning two boulders. The entrance to the hidden staircase? More dead will emerge from there any moment and join those scaling the cliffs. I need my former captors out of the way. I need to get to my mother.

I whirl to my other side, feeling Bastien close in. Under the starlight, his rough-cut beauty is stark and raw, a siren song of its own. A rush of warmth prickles through me, but I stare him down. “You shouldn’t have come here.” He’s going to get himself killed.

“You shouldn’t have left.” He glances around us. “You were safer in the catacombs.”

Is he mocking me? He starved me of Light. Stripped me of my grace bones. He might as well have cut out a vital organ. “Is that why you came back, to keep me safe?” I chance another peek at the boulders. If I make a run for the stairs, maybe I’ll have fewer Chained to fight there. “Are you going to protect me or kill me?” I throw a pointed look at the crude knife in the white-knuckled grip of his hand.

“Excellent question.” Jules briefly tears her gaze from the growing roar of the dead.

Bastien’s jaw muscle flinches. “Wouldn’t you kill me if you were able to?”

“Gladly,” I snap, but my conviction dies in the truth blazing between us. My heart skips faster. He knows I spared his life tonight when I ran away. And he spared mine when I fell into the pit. Still, how does that change our fates? “I’ve trained all my life for this. I don’t need your protection.”

He doesn’t look so sure. “Why are the shouts coming louder now? The land bridge is gone.”

My chest tightens. I spin around. The soul bridge has submerged so deeply that no one is standing on it anymore. My mother is in the shallow water near the beach, wrestling two Chained. Maybe I can throw the flute down to her. Maybe it’s not too late. If she can’t raise the Gates tonight, we’ll have to wait another month for the next new moon.