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Orianna lets out a loud bark of excitement as we enter, and Reese curses as his familiar launches off his shoulder with a squawk of annoyance.
Johannsson startles awake, nearly tipping out of his chair. He grumbles and stands before mumbling about going to the bathroom and leaving the room.
“Flint.” Xander stands from his desk and presses his hands against his lower back in a stretch. “Have you come to lend a hand?”
“And some sustenance.” I set the bag on his desk and whistle for Orianna to come back to my side, which she ignores.
I glance down at the blank white paper that covers his desk and the bone hand at its center. “Have you made any progress on the spell?”
Xander sighs and falls back into his chair. “Not much. We know the spell’s purpose, but without the source, it’s difficult to know how to counter it. The symbol isn’t like anything I’ve seen before.”
Reese pushes back his shaggy brown hair. “We’re pretty sure it’s mostly mumbo-jumbo, but pulling apart the individual pieces is proving difficult.”
I open the bag and pass Xander a container of noodles, then set a bowl of rice with orange chicken in front of Reese. “What do you mean, mumbo-jumbo?”
“Made up.” Reese flutters his fingers over the hand that lies on the desk. “Someone with no knowledge of the arcane threw spaghetti at the wall and accidentally summoned something.”
“What they named the Bone Man.” I pull out a box of plain breaded chicken with steamed vegetables.
When I set it on the floor, that gets Orianna’s attention where I could not, and she trots over to my side, nosing at the food.
Xander glances toward a radio on the cabinet behind him. “The news has been saying Mother Nature attacked because she’s angry over climate change.”
I snort out a laugh and grab the container of sesame chicken over brown rice for myself. “Hardly. They only saw the top of it, and not much at that.”
I explain what happened in between bites of food, my stomach demanding sustenance after using so much magic. I already ate a box of egg rolls on the way over, but I’m ravenous.
“So it’s a monster that strips away souls and uses their bones to create a body for itself?” Reese drums his fingers on the desk. “And it’s also somehow providing good luck to whoever summoned it.”
Xander shakes his head. “They’d be long dead by now.”
“It’s a generational spell upheld by the Berdherst family.” I drop my empty container back into the bag. “They’ve been sacrificing things to this monster for hundreds of years.”
Xander’s brow furrows. “But didn’t it escape the Between only six years ago?”
I pull over a chair to sit. “Mayn thinks that what we fought was an infant. She said it didn’t have the power or size to match the stories. It’s possible that the stories embellished it, or…”
“Being trapped in the Between reduced it back to an infant.” Xander’s gaze drops to the hand, and he nods. “If this thing needs souls to survive and will get up and move to new power sources when it’s exhausted its current supply, then being cut off from living beings would have crippled it. In that kind of environment—”
“It would have turned on itself for sustenance,” Reese eagerly finishes.
I nod in agreement. “So, what we fought today was likely the one that escaped from the Between. And it was in contact with the other Bone Man that the Berdherst family has been communing with.”
Johannsson comes back into the room. “That would explain the tunnels underground that Pen and Darius found running through the Ward around the Bone Yard. They were communicating with each other, and it was feeding the older one bones to make it strong again.”
We all turn to stare at him in surprise.
“What?” He grabs the remaining container of food off the desk and returns to his chair. “You think I don’t listen when you’re all talking about the evil happenings in Clearhelm?”
I actually thought it all went in one ear and out the other, but I don’t voice that.
Johannsson pops open his container of General Tso chicken and digs in. “So, we just need to stop feeding the Bone Man magic, burn it out of existence, and Berdherst will lose all his magical backing and get kicked out of office, right?”
“In a very simplified way, yes.” I exchange glances with Xander and Reese. “But first we need to find it.”
“It’s in the forest,” Johannsson says around a mouthful of chicken.
When we all stare at him, he rolls his eyes. “Are you for real right now? Weren’t you all going on about how you felt watched earlier? The news said the thing had eyes in its leaves, right? And that’s where the bone pit was. It’s a logical assumption.”
