Page 9 of Silver in the Bone

A wolf and a hound, brothers in fear, one wild, the other tame, howled up at the glowing orb in the sky. Near their feet, a crayfish crawled from the edge of a pool.

My gaze drifted to the dark hound again, my stomach tightening.

“How did it go today?” Cabell asked, drawing my attention back to him.

After taking my cut of the day’s earnings and locking the rest in the safe, I held up two hundred-dollar bills.

“Hey, hey. Look who’s buying dinner tonight,” he said. “I await the fabled Lobster Larry’s Unlimited Seafood Tower.”

My brother was all lanky height and had little meat on his bones, but he looked perfectly comfortable in what I’d come to think of as the tried-and-true uniform of Hollowers: loose brown slacks and a belt laden with the tools of the trade, including a hand axe, crystals, and vials of fast-acting poison and antivenom.

All of which were needed if you wanted to empty the sorceress’s vault of the treasures she’d hoarded over the centuries and keep both life and limb.

“Why not just eat garbage from the dumpster out back instead?” I said. “You’ll get the same dining experience.”

“I take that to mean you want to stop by the library and try to drop in on some potential clients before we order pizza for the tenth night in a row,” he said.

“What happened with the key for the Sorceress Gaia’s job?” I asked, reaching for my bag. “Was there a match in the library’s collection, or did you have to go to the Bonecutter after all?”

To open a sealed Vein, one of the magic pathways the sorceresses created for themselves, we needed bone and blood from the one who created it, or her kin. The Bonecutter sourced and procured them.

“Had to ask the Bonecutter,” he said, passing the key to me to examine. It looked like two finger bones welded with a seam of gold. “We’re all set to open the tomb this weekend.”

“God’s teeth,” I muttered. “What did the key cost us?”

“Just the usual,” he said, shrugging a shoulder. “A favor.”

“We can’t keep handing out favors,” I said tightly, making quick work of switching off the music and the battery-powered candles.

“Why not?” He leaned a hip against the doorframe.

The small movement—that careless tone of voice—brought me up short. He’d never reminded me more of Nash, the crook of a man who had reluctantly raised us and drawn us into his profession, only to abandon us to it before either of us had passed our first decade of life.

Cabell cast a quick look around my Mystic Maven setup. “You’ll have to ditch this bullshit gig if you want to be able to pay the Bone-cutter with actual coin next time.”

Somehow we’d arrived at my least-favorite conversation yet again. “This ‘bullshit gig’ buys us groceries and pays for the roof over our heads. You could ask for more shifts at the tattoo parlor.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.” Cabell let out an irritating hum. “If we just went after a legendary relic—”

“If we just found a unicorn,” I interrupted. “If we just uncovered a lost trove of pirates’ treasure. If we just caught a falling star and put it in our pockets ...”

“All right,” Cabell said, his smile falling. “Enough. You’ve made your point.”

We weren’t like the other Hollowers and Nash, who chased mist and dreams. Sure, selling a legendary object on the black market could make you thousands, if not millions, but the cost was years of searching for an ever-dwindling number of relics. The magic users of other parts of the world had secured their treasures, leaving only Europe’s up for grabs. And, besides, we’d never had the right resources for a big get.

“Real money comes from real jobs,” I reminded him. And whether I liked it or not, Mystic Maven was a real job, one with flexible hours and fair wages graciously paid under the table. We needed it to supplement the for-hire work we took from the guild library’s job board, especially as the number of those postings thinned and clients cheaped out on the finder’s fees.

Mystic Maven may have been a tourist trap built on incense and fish-stick-scented woo-woo nonsense, but it had given us the one thing we’d never had before. Stability.

Nash had never enrolled us in school. He had never forged identity paperwork for either of us, the two orphans he’d collected from different sides of the world like two more of his stupid trinkets. What we had was this world of Hollowers and sorceresses, unknown and unseen by nearly everyone else. We’d been raised at the knee of jealousy, fed by the hand of envy, and sheltered under the roof of greed.

The truth was, Nash hadn’t just forced both of us into this world—he had trapped us in it.

I liked the life we had carved out for ourselves, and the small measure of stability we’d scrounged now that we were older and could fend for ourselves.

Unfortunately, Cabell wanted what Nash had: the potential, the glory, the high of a find.

His lips compressed as he scratched at his wrist. “Nash always said—”

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