Page 74 of Hallowed Bones

CHAPTER 26REYES

For those who covet beyond measure, who dare to shape yourselves in the image of the Divine, heed these words: Once hunger seeds its roots within you, it will never cease. You reach for power not meant for mortals. You will soon feel the consequences of such greed. Ash will fill thy lungs, and an eternal living death will become your only companion. Your bloodlines shall know no happiness until the Gods forgive. If they ever do.

—EXCERPT FROM LETTER SENT FROM ELIZABETH WARDWELL, 1692, RECIPIENT UNKNOWN

The scents of cedar and mugwort fill the air, cloaking everything in a shroud. Dimitri’s silver hair is shot with strands of black—the last vestiges of his youth clinging for dear life even as his overuse of magic divests him of his energy years before his time. We eye each other speculatively as I await an answer to my question.

Standing near the foot of his bed, I glare at the older man. He’s a replica of Ezra, only thirty or so years his senior. Still, he doesn’t reply. “You’re stalling,” I tell him, my tone clipped and short.

“I’m considering,” Dimitri rasps, glaring right back at me from sunken eyes. “A lost art among the young.”

I snort. “You’re not that old, D.” He’s barely into his fifties—though he looks at least a decade older. Then again, he’s looked older since his twin, and Ezra’s father, passed.

“Tell that to my aching bones,” he replies, shifting in the bed that he hasn’t left for months but to shuffle to the bathroom or sit out on his balcony.

I roll my eyes. “You just don’t want to admit it,” I finally say. “Which can only mean one thing…” I eye him speculatively. “Age does make it shrink.”

Dimitri lifts a gnarled, wrinkled hand and gives me a rude gesture. I laugh, and his responding grin is enough to know that my playful teasing has brought him some relief from his daily aches and pains. Almost as soon as the laughter fills the room, it fades.

It’s tragic to see a man that all of us once thought larger than life now brought so low. He’s become a cautionary tale of why magic is so dangerous. This is what it can do to the body if you overuse it, if you abuse it. If it doesn’t kill you quickly, then it kills you like this—slowly and painfully. Dimitri might have been saved this, were it not for his bastard of a brother.

Shoving the ugly memory of Kane Bishop to the back of my mind as two figures appear in the open doorway of Dimitri’s bedroom, I turn to greet them with a nod. Cameron and Ezra move into the spacious bedroom with its high ceilings and thick drapery near the balcony doors that face the south side of the Bishop property. Ezra separates from Cameron and goes to Dimitri’s side.

“How are you feeling today, Uncle?”

Dimitri waves a wrinkled hand in his direction. “Pah!” He scowls. “I’m already dead,” he says. “My body just hasn’t gotten the news yet.”

Cruel words, and were they not spoken in that dry, humorous tone, I might have flinched at them. Instead, I feel my lips twitch—just as Dimitri intended. Crazy old goat that he is, he’s accepted his fate. When my name is called and the Gods are ready to take me, I hope to die with as much dignity as this man.

I uncross my arms to lean forward, hooking them over the oakwood footboard. “You sure have a decent romantic life for a dead man,” I say lightly. “Anna left here the other week with quite a nice pep in her step.”

Dimitri’s clouded gray eyes, shot with hints of the same shade of blue as his nephew’s, narrow on me. A moment later, his expression relaxes, and he grins toothily. “Jealous?” he taunts.

I snort. “You bet your ass I am. I’ve been telling you I was going to marry Anna since I was seven years old. It’s rude that you’re coming for my woman now after all this time.”

His chest rises in slow, uneven pulls as he takes several breaths before responding. “She needs a man, youngling, not a boy.”

Before I can taunt the old goat again, the fifth and final member of our coven appears in the doorway. Lyall steps into the bedroom, hair windswept and his face flushed with color. The door swings silently shut behind him.

Magic crackles in the air, and all taunting amusement disperses. I release the footboard and move several steps back, taking my place in this makeshift circle since we can’t hold it in the coven chambers. Dimitri would never make it down there with his body the way it is.

As a unit, Lyall, Cameron, Ezra, and I form a ring around our last remaining elder. Dimitri Bishop coughs, a hacking, wet sound, even as he struggles to sit up against the mountain of pillows at his back. He clasps his hands over his lap, his breaths low and wheezing.

“This meeting has been called to bring forth a new member of the coven,” Ezra begins. “We have come to ask for the aid and wisdom of our elder, Dimitri Bishop. What say you?”

In response, Dimitri releases another cough that echoes with the sound of phlegm. No one speaks. No one moves to pat his back, offer him a handkerchief, or touch him at all.

We wait. Silently, if not a little impatiently.

It hurts to see him this way—the man that’s been more of a father to us than half of our own fathers. The strange illness that’s taken root over the last few years wanes on occasion but, more often than not, grows steadily stronger even as it leaches the life from him.

He’s a ghost of his old self. Pale. Hollow-eyed. But there’s still something sharp under all that illness, something that says if you push him, he’ll retaliate. Ill though he may be, Dimitri deserves our respect, and so we show it to him in this way. We keep him in our coven despite his faded magic. Once coven-born, always coven-loved.

Dimitri eyes his nephew. He, as well as the rest of us, knows that Ezra is the true reason we’re having this meeting. “Tell me about the girl,” he demands, finally managing to speak past the wheezing of his own throat. “Is she truly one of us?”

Silence. My attention shifts to Ezra, taking in the onyx-like stillness of his form. His hands clench into fists at his sides, and his jaw is tight, a muscle leaping and pulsing beneath the surface of his skin. An ache echoes in the chambers of my heart.

Just admit it, I want to tell him. You want her as much as the rest of us do.