Read Online Bone Walker by Angela Korra'ti - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t much for it but to do as Millicent bade us. Christopher and I did the absolute minimum to get publicly presentable, clothes- and hygiene-wise. Christopher had kept watch and then dozed in the same clothes he’d worn to the concert, so he was stuck with that, but I risked ducking into my bedroom long enough for something clean to wear. And more importantly, for the wolf’s head necklace Jude herself had given me, which Christopher had imbued with some of his Warding power. I hadn’t worn it much in the last couple of months, since things had been quiet enough that I hadn’t needed the protection, and I didn’t want to risk losing it.
    I had the unpleasant suspicion I was going to need it now.
    Breakfast would have to be on the go: granola bars and Gatorade. Fort demanded breakfast of his own, but Millie overruled my efforts to feed him and shooed us on out the door. Armed with my reloaded tote bag, I headed with Christopher out into the morning, and prayed as we went that this day wouldn’t end as disastrously as the one before.
----
    She was cold through and through, and yet, she burned. It felt as though she should be ill, but Jude didn’t
feel
ill. If anything, she had enough energy brimming through her limbs that if she’d had a mind to, she could have jogged around the entire city. Walking the Wards, just like Millie, just like Christopher.
    The thought made her giggle as she escaped Kendis’ house with no one within it the wiser. Power, just like the Warders, that’s what she felt as though she had. Magic to do anything she wanted, anything in the world, and all she had to do was seek it out—
    Then the autumn morning struck a hammer blow across her senses before she even made it to her truck. Even the feeble sunlight of this particular land in the mortal realm was more than she’d felt upon her skin in time beyond counting. Clean, rain-kissed air was sweet wine to breathe in; the bright shades of leaves against the pale blue of the sky were such relief after immeasurable darkness that she almost wept at the sight.
    Mortal realm?
    Darkness?
    Wait, what…?
    Jude swayed, grabbing at the door handle on her truck for support, and even the simple contact of her palm against cool metal struck her speechless.
    What’s wrong with me?
    Then the voice from her dream came back, louder now, and every word that sounded across her mind wrapped her flesh in a cloak of snow.
    Nothing at all is wrong with you, my little snowwoman, nothing that I can’t handle. You don’t need to worry about anything at all.
    Right. She
was
a snowwoman, Jude remembered now. Shaped from the blowing flakes, packed into a pleasing shape by the clever unseen hands in the cold. Her chest was ice, her limbs shimmering frost, and she would be forever preserved and shining. All she had to do was just vanish into the snow.
    I can do that.
    Approval was the last thing she remembered before her mind’s eye filled with winter. She never felt the heat building in her hand, somewhere far outside the statue of snow she’d felt herself become, or sensed her fingers opening the door of the truck.
    She never saw her own face, reflected in the window glass before her, smiling.
----
    Christopher didn’t say much as we hopped a Metro bus to head to Jude’s apartment in Laurelhurst. I didn’t call him on it, at least not while we were still on the bus. Conversation about Sidhe and magic and the Unseelie bard we’d left in my bedroom wasn’t something I wanted to have where we could be overheard. He did at least keep an arm around my shoulders during the ride, and there was comfort in that, even if he stared out the window in a brooding funk the whole time.
    Once we got off the bus and out of earshot of the stop shelter, though, I tugged at his hand. “You’re awfully quiet. What are you thinking?”
    He slanted me a sidewise look, and one corner of his mouth curled