Which leaves me…I don’t know where. I mean, I don’t believe for one second that Jaxon would kill his brother without being sure that it was the only option. At the same time, though, Hudson has lived in my head for days, and I’m beginning to recognize when he’s full of shit and when he’s telling the truth.

This latest diatribe of his smacks of the truth.

What I’m supposed to do with this version of the truth, I don’t know. And I don’t have a clue how I’m supposed to reconcile it with Jaxon’s version. Either way, I’m not sure this changes my feelings on if Hudson can be trusted to come back with his powers.

He pauses, then shakes his head with a pissed-off laugh. “Why am I not surprised?” He stands up to his full height, hands on hips, gaze holding mine in its punishing depth. “I know how much you love to lump everyone and everything into just two groups, Grace. Good versus evil. But don’t you think it’s about time you grew up?”

He shakes his head and leans over another pile I’d looked at earlier. I’m about to argue that I am grown up, thank you very much, and also that I was starting to think maybe Hudson was trying to protect humans with his killing spree—which no one has once considered—when he lets out a celebratory whoop. “I found one!” he shouts, pointing to a bone the size of his arm.

“That’s fantastic!” I rush around to look at the bone myself and confirm it’s whole and small enough that we can carry it out. “Let’s go round up the others.”

I pick up the bone and take only a couple of steps toward Jaxon and Mekhi before a pile of bones directly behind us starts to rustle.

“What’s that?” I ask, whirling around as my imagination runs wild. Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if an army of angry pixies flew out of the center of a pile of bones and tried to set us on fire.

“I don’t know,” Hudson answers. “Stay near me.”

I don’t bother to point out how ridiculous that statement is. One glance at his face spells out just how clearly he gets it and how frustrated he is by it.

As we head to the front, a second bone pile starts to shudder, bones clacking together in an almost songlike rhythm. An eerie-as-fuck song, mind you, but a song nonetheless.

Hudson and I look at each other, eyebrows raised, then start moving faster as we head to the front of the cavern. And when a third pile of bones starts to rumble, he urges, “We need to move!”

But before we take more than a couple of steps, a giant leg bone falls from the ceiling and crashes into the spot right beside us.

It shatters as soon as it hits the ground in a thundering explosion, bone shards flying like mortar shells in all directions. One slices me right beneath my left eye, and blood starts pouring down my face.

“Fuck!” Flint yells from across the cavern. “A dragon must have just died! I think the Boneyard is calling the bones home.”

“You think that’s what’s going on?” Xavier shouts as he grabs Macy’s hand and they make a mad dash for the landing pad area where she’d been working on building a portal earlier.

Moments later, the other leg bone falls—about six inches from where Xavier and Macy had been searching.

“We’ve got to go,” Flint yells. “Now!”

“We can’t go now,” Eden tells him. “We don’t have a bone yet.”

“Hudson and I found one,” I say, holding up our find as a giant rib bone falls in the back of the cavern.

“Then let’s blow this pop stand!” Xavier yells as he and Macy make a beeline for the cavern entrance.

“I’m with them,” Mekhi says, right before he fades to the front of the Boneyard—and doesn’t stop until he’s on the safe side of the entrance.

“Me too,” Jaxon agrees just as what I think is a tailbone comes crashing straight down at us.

Jaxon throws an arm up at the last second and uses his telekinesis to send the bone spinning to the back of the chamber. Then does the same again and again and again, as more and more of the tail starts to fall, faster and faster. Flint and Eden are almost at the front now, where Macy and Xavier are standing just outside the Boneyard, Macy wringing her hands as she watches the carnage unfold.

A neck bone suddenly comes flying at Flint out of nowhere, and Jaxon turns and sends it soaring away.

But the split second it takes to help Flint leaves Jaxon vulnerable, and when the next bone comes flying down—an absolutely massive rib bone—he isn’t fast enough, or strong enough, to stop it.

At the last moment, he shoves me away as hard as he can, and I end up tumbling butt-first into a pile of bones, just as the colossal rib bone crashes into Jaxon and slams him to the ground hard enough to knock him out.

86

Grace Under Fire

“Jaxon!” I scream, scrambling up from the pile of bone shards he knocked me into in order to save me. My hands and arms are scraped to hell, but I barely register that as I race across the distance between us. “Oh my God, Jaxon!”

“Look out,” Hudson snaps, and I pull back just as a giant bone—I’m too close to tell what it is—crashes in front of me and explodes into thousands of fragments that have me dropping the bone and covering my face with my arms.

“Okay, go,” Hudson says when it’s safe again, and I finish the dash to his brother just as another bone comes flying at me. It’s a smaller one, and I brace myself for impact, but it explodes moments before it strikes me.

Bone shards fall everywhere.

Seconds later, the same thing happens to a bone that’s about to fall on Jaxon.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t care. As long as bones keep exploding, that means they aren’t landing on one of us, and that is something I can get behind.

I drop to my knees next to Jaxon and start trying to tug the bone off him, but it doesn’t budge. It’s too big, and I’m not strong enough, even when I put my back against it and try to use my legs for leverage.

“Jaxon!” Flint yells and races back toward Jaxon and me.

Mekhi beats him to it—but only by a couple seconds—and then the two of them pick up the bone like it’s nothing and send it flying.

But Jaxon is still out, and when I feel the back of his head, there’s a giant bump there. Huh. Who knew vampires could get concussions?

All around us, bones keep falling in giant, thunderous explosions. I remember watching this documentary once on World War II and how the soldiers suffered PTSD for the rest of their lives from the experience of surviving mortar fire, and now I get it. I really, really get it.

It starts with the sound of something falling from the sky. Then a quick, desperate look up, only to realize that the sky is vast and the sound could be coming from any direction. So you turn, try to identify the source of the sound as it gets louder and louder, only to realize it could actually be coming from the opposite direction you’re looking in and you’ll never even see it before the blast hits you.

The sheer panic of not being able to tell from what direction danger is coming completely steals your ability to even try to save yourself. And in that moment, you feel utterly powerless. Utterly vulnerable. Utterly alone.

Surviving soldiers say they would just run blindly toward what they hoped was safety, never knowing if their next step would be their last.

And now I have an inkling of what they went through, and it is the most terrifying experience of my life because of the total and complete inability to guess where the next hit is coming from.

What happened with Lia was frightening, but this is devastating. Completely soul-crushing.

One after another, bones fall from the cavern ceiling, no rhyme or reason, no pattern, nothing. It’s utter chaos. As each bone slams into a bone pile, fragments fly in all directions, and before long, Mekhi, Flint, and I are cut all to hell.

Still, no bone has fallen on us, so I count it as a win.

But I know it’s only a matter of time. We need to get the fuck out of here—now.

“Can you carry him?” I ask Mekhi. “Just fade to the front of the Boneyard with him over your shoulder?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Mekhi grabs Jaxon and fades toward the front of the Boneyard, while Flint and I both shift. Then we take to the air and race toward the entrance.

“Get moving, Grace!” Hudson growls as another bone comes crashing toward me.

I’m trying, I snap, pushing my wings as hard as I can.

“Try harder,” he snaps back. “Or you’ll die in here.”

Like I don’t know that?

Flint deliberately pulls above me—I think to block me from flying bones, which I hate because it means he’s made himself more vulnerable. That knowledge has me struggling to go faster, and we plow through the air, desperate to get to the exit.

But bones are falling in earnest now, from every direction, and shrapnel is flying up every time a bone crashes to the ground. The noise is deafening, and fear is a metallic taste in my mouth. The need to survive is a visceral tug deep inside me, a desperation that claws at me right beneath my skin.

The fact that there is nothing I can do about it makes everything worse. No choice I can make that might make it better, no path I can try that might lessen the gravity of the danger. I have no choice except to pray that I get out of this alive.

So in the end, I do the only thing I can. I take a deep breath and surrender to the lack of control. Let it beat against my heart like a wild thing. And then I just fly.

Flint drops behind me right at the end, and the two of us shoot through the narrowing entrance of the Boneyard—one after the other. We collapse on the ground near the landing pad—where everyone else is waiting…also on the ground.

I can barely breathe. My heart is about to pound out of my chest, and I’ve never been so exhausted in my life. A glance at Flint, and everyone else, shows they aren’t doing much better.

Jaxon is starting to stir on the ground, thank God, and as soon as I can breathe without coughing, I crawl over to him.