Graveyard of Lullabies

Chapter 10 (know you best)

Rattle-bones sleeps downstairs, on the couch, completing a triangle between him, the magenta egg, and the sea cat. I sit on the bottom stair, unable to sleep, even though it has been dark long enough that the water droplets on the kitchen floor are freezing. I try to count water droplets instead of staring at Rattle-bones asleep.

I pace through the dining room to the front door, step carefully on the creaking floor, pause, stare into the kitchen and exhale into the silence. I know I've been avoiding it. Rattle-bones has me thinking too much. About bones.

Skeleton Cook watches me with worried eyes from his seat on the counter. I quietly tug the fake fridge open. As it swings, faint starlight through the window glints off the mineral surface. I shut my eyes and step into the mouth of the cave blindly; I don't need starlight to remind me. My fingers trace the shelf where the backpack used to sit. I haven't removed it from the cave's belly; we're just leaving again tomorrow.

The way through the cave's throat bumps unevenly under my feet, a sign that no ice has melted and dripped and refrozen in a slippery pond. The space outside my fingers widens, and I enter the cave's chest. Opening my eyes, I stare at the table. The clear one, with somebody's bones beneath it. I could never make myself chisel opaque wounds in the table's skin to cover the skeleton. I couldn't.

I tiptoe through the chest, trace my fingers over the ice over the bones, buried beneath the ice block I call a table. The ice is so clear, I pretend I could lie belly down on the floor and reach a hand out to touch them.

Instead I sit on the table, stare at my hands beside my legs, trace the quivering cold against my thighs. But pale bones gleam beneath me, reminding me, so I lie on my back on the hard surface. Stare at the dark, ice ceiling.

Brain, I am so sorry. Really. There just aren't enough words.

Instead, a memory: him, you, standing in the water at the beach, Kolariq dressed in blue wraps brighter than the ocean's horizon. None of the other boys were there--the older ones had gone on a field trip, the younger ones stayed busy inside at a table of dead fish. You were glad Kolariq brought you out to the beach, because the cave smelled too much of dead fish.

Your palm stung, from the knife. Aquamarine blood welled in the cut. Aukai had the beginnings of red blood--something that amazed you--dripping from his hand. He grimaced, carelessly tossed the knife to shore. It landed sideways, just beyond the reach of the waves.

"Now what?" Aukai called.

"Let it drip," Kolariq said back. "And hold it steady above the water."

Aukai turned to you, cyan-eyes glittering. He grimaced again, but tilted his hand so the blood dripped. You did the same, and three heavy droplets plummeted to the water. You tried to stop them, with your powers, but it felt like trying to talk out of your nose. Or see out of your ears. It was nothing like holding a skeleton together. It was nothing like the language of killing magic.

"I said, hold it steady above the water," Kolariq called to you.

Aukai nearly snarled. Which nearly made you want to punch him. Or Kolariq. Or both. You'd both had more than enough of dead fish, the odor clinging to your nose by stone walls and an unyielding instructor.

You focused on the blood on your hand, instead of the blood already falling. You pinpointed some glimmering sense of binding, between you and it, but that had always been there. It was your blood, after all. So you tried to bind it tighter. All that did was send a searing pain up your forearm, like stabbing scales. You yelped and let the binding go.