Bones and Heart by Katherine Harbour Read Free Book Online

BONES AND HEART
    A Night and Nothing Short Tale
    By Katherine Harbour
THE PAST
    T he spirit-things took whatever shape they desired. This one, for years, had pretended to be a comely young man, luring the desperate and the curious to their demise. It had left the corpse of a wealthy merchant’s daughter in a London ruin, and Jack had seen her remains. The dark mass Jack’s father had exorcised had murdered her—the spirit had been a young man until his father had invoked poetry and flung silver dust into its face. Jack, who at sixteen had resented being left behind and had followed his father from the inn room to witness the exorcism, had been hiding and had watched the young man break apart into a living shadow.
    Chasing the spirit now, Jack wished two things: that he hadn’t worn so many talismans, which jingled faintly whenever he moved; and that he still had his Rambler bicycle, because he really could have used it for this. Not more than an hour ago, his father had driven the creature from the city ruin, hoping to trap it in the spirit bottle he’d bought with the merchant’s money.
    The London night was silver with fog that muffled the sounds of noisy pubs and horse-drawn carriages. There weren’t many people out at this hour in this part of the city, but Jack had a pistol if the human element ever became a problem. His grandfather’s top hat and the greatcoat his mother had made for himconcealed his physicality, but he knew the thing he trailed could identify him in other ways.
    The shadow mass, scuttling like a giant spider, had disappeared into a burned-down house. Past the blackened timbers, Jack saw a darkness that was sentient, wily. Waiting. His father had let the thing escape after the failure with the bottle. What Jack didn’t understand was . . . why?
    From within the mess of charred timbers, he heard a scream that sent his heart galloping. He gripped the silver dagger in his pocket, his hand sweaty around the pommel.
    A girl lunged from the shadows, dark hair veiling her face, her red coat billowing. She fell. When she looked up, Jack saw the terror in her eyes.
    He dashed forward, grabbed her hand, and hauled her up just as the thing appeared—a buzzing mass of darkness whose presence burst a vessel in his nostrils and made the air crackle. His father had warned him about this, the disorientation of another reality forcing its way into the true world. Reassert your own reality.
    He and the girl backed away as the shadows twined into a silver-eyed young man with a mournful mouth and a focused routine. The shadow man whispered, “Please, beautiful maiden. Save m—”
    “I’m not a maiden.” Jack stabbed the silver blade into its white face.
THE PRESENT
    The mansion sat, menacing on a New Orleans street forgotten by the modern Renaissance. With its shuttered windows and garden shrouded in creepers, haunted by statues from a myriad of mythologies, the abandoned place seemed to whisper: Stay away.
    Jack Fata regarded the relic. As a nearby streetlamp flickered, his comrade, Phouka, walked around her Cadillac parked at the curb and stood beside him. Her eyes glinted an eerie silver.
    “Mr. Bones.” Jack’s coat swept around him in a wind riddled with dead leaves and cobwebs. “What a name.”
    Phouka, sleek in black suede and motorcycle boots, her auburn hair spikily knotted, tilted her head. “What do you think of his haunt?”
    “There’s no glamour. You’d think he’d welcome us by prettifying his lair a bit.”
    “It does have that air of ‘Stay-away-or-you’ll-die-a-horrible-death’ chic. Perhaps he wasn’t expecting us?”
    Jack began walking. “What does she want with this ghoul?”
    “It’s almost All Hallows,” she reminded him.
    Sorrow uncurled within the toxic garden flourishing around the hollow that had replaced his heart. “And we wouldn’t want anything to go wrong with that, would we?”
    “No, Jack.” Phouka frowned at him. “We wouldn’t.”
THE PAST
    “What