Bone Crier's Moon (Bone Grace #1)(67)

I open a door leading off the cellar. Ailesse stiffens as I reach for her. Her pupils flicker and reflect the candle’s flame. “Does that lead to the catacombs?” she asks.

I nod. This entrance beneath Chapelle du Pauvre was built long ago for families who couldn’t afford burial plots above. Here, they were able to carry down their departed loved ones and place them in unmarked graves below. “Can you think of any safer place from the dead?”

She shakes her head slowly. “The dead don’t want to believe they’re dead. The catacombs are a reminder.”

I lean against the doorjamb. “They won’t stop chasing you, you know. You’re like a beacon to them.”

She twists her hands in her lap and gives me such a long look that my ears prickle with heat. “I won’t go in there as your prisoner,” she says, her voice iron.

I could make her. She’s lost her strength. It would be easy to bind her up again. “And I won’t show you the hidden place in there if you try to kill me,” I counter.

“I’ve proven I’m not going to kill you.”

I sigh. “I’m not going to take you prisoner again, Ailesse. We’re just going to have to trust one another.”

She shifts on the crate. Her dress and the ends of her hair are still caked with gray silt mud. I’m coated in a good layer myself. We’ve brought the old catacombs with us. “Why are you helping me?” she asks.

I give a little shrug, averting my gaze. “If you die, I die, right? So I figure we need to stick together.”

“And you promise to search for Jules?”

“I promise. I know everywhere she’d think to hide.”

Ailesse exhales. “Everything you saw tonight—all the chaos and danger—happened because my mother played the siren song on the wrong flute. I have to get the right one back to her by the next new moon, or else—”

“I know.” I want the ghosts of the dead ferried, too.

Ailesse bites her lower lip. It’s cracked and parched. Did I give her enough water to drink in our old chamber? I glance at her wrists, raw and bruised from the ropes I tied her up with.

She has every reason to hate me.

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll go with you.”

A rush of coolness washes through my chest. Relief? I don’t understand myself. “Can you walk now?”

“I think so.”

I flex my hand and reach for hers. As our palms slide together, my heart gives a hard pound. I briefly meet her umber eyes. They’re uneasy, but also warm.

They’re also damn gorgeous.

I swallow a lump in my throat and guide her past the door, then into the tunnel toward my secret hideout in the catacombs.





30


Sabine


AILESSE, WHERE ARE YOU? I’VE recovered my bow and quiver from the shore and have an arrow drawn as I pretend to hunt the golden jackal. I follow Ailesse’s and Bastien’s tracks as far as a knoll in the forest, where they meet up with other tracks—no doubt, her other captors—but then the tracks diverge and Ailesse’s are lost.

“Stay where I can see you, Sabine,” Milicent says, her voice firm though not unkind. “I may have vulture vision, but I can’t see through a thick copse of trees.”

I weave out of the copse, where I’ve found no sign of Ailesse, and mask my resentful glare. Odiva assigned Milicent to accompany me, while the other Ferriers were allowed to set off on their own, in order to gain more ground on the hunt for the jackal. The matrone is having me watched. She wants to ensure I don’t risk my life by trying to rescue her daughter. Isn’t Odiva worried about risking Ailesse’s life?

“It’s almost dawn.” Milicent sighs and looks up at the sky. “We need to turn back. Hopefully the others had better luck.”

Yes. Vain hope fills my chest. Maybe one of them found Ailesse.

We return empty-handed to the meeting spot Odiva designated—the cliffs over the submerged land bridge. Several Ferriers are already here. But no Ailesse. A painful lump rises in my throat. She was so close after all these days we’ve been apart. How did I let her get taken again?

Milicent and I near the other Ferriers, and their whispers reach my ears.

“Where have the dead gone?”

“Toward the city, of course, where the most people are.”

“They want Light.”

“What are we going to do about them?”

“Yes, Ailesse is alive.”

“Why hasn’t the matrone sent us to find her?”

Because the matrone has secrets. I don’t know what they are, but they have to be the reason she’s failing her daughter again and again.

The sun rises, casting a blade of light across the plateau, and Odiva finally rejoins us. Without the golden jackal. Claw marks scrape along the right side of her face and neck.

“Matrone.” Giselle gasps. “Are you all right?”

Odiva holds her head high and wears a reassuring smile. “I came this close to the jackal,” she tells all of us, gesturing to her wounds like they’re tokens of honor. “Tyrus is almost ready to give him to me.”

I frown, examining her scrapes closer. The lines are grouped three scratches wide, not four like the front claws of a canine. Plus, there’s a white feather with an amber edge caught among the eagle feathers of Odiva’s epaulettes. I know which animal it belongs to—the same animal whose talons match the marks on Odiva.