Bookshops & Bonedust (Legends & Lattes, #0)(85)

Varine impatiently lunged forward and snatched it.

Viv’s fingers jerked toward her saber, but she stayed her hand, glancing with concern at Fern and Gallina.

“Ah,” murmured Varine, running her fingertips over the cover. The glyphs inscribed into its surface fluttered alight behind her touch. “I’ve missed you so, my dear one,” she said, her words rich with longing, a greeting for a long-lost lover.

With a twist of her wrist, a cascade of bones slithered from beneath the hem of her robe, piling one atop the other into a grotesque lectern, upon which she placed the grimoire.

She flipped back the cover, and then suddenly frowned, her perfect brow wrinkling in dismay. “What … ?” She turned to a page in the middle.

Varine gazed in annoyance at the dogeared corner, curled over the black void of the page itself, and reached across to fold it back.

In that instant Satchel’s hands burst from the darkness and seized first her wrist and then her forearm … and pulled.

The necromancer shrieked in surprise as her arm was dragged into the shadows, her black eyes wide with fury. She braced her other hand on the open book and hauled with all her might to withdraw her arm from the night-dark page.

Her gaze snapped to Viv even as the orc unlimbered Blackblood, her fangs bared.

“You,” snarled the necromancer, muscling herself upright even as Satchel’s hands climbed higher along her arm, undeterred. She snapped her free hand toward Viv, fingers contorting and flexing. Blue traceries webbed her palm and wound around her fingers like burning thread. In that blue light, Viv saw her death gathering.

She wound up with the greatsword, putting all her weight into it and praying she’d complete the swing before Varine could bring her awful magic to bear.

But then a hooting squawk rang out, and suddenly Potroast was sailing through the air, catching Varine’s free forearm in his beak and knocking her entirely off balance.

She screamed, a terrible, ragged sound. The gryphet’s beak sank deeper into the bloodless flesh of her arm.

Viv brought her swing up short as Satchel seized the moment, and Varine’s head and neck disappeared into the page. Her cry bubbled into a muffled wail that echoed into nothingness. The skeletal hands grasped and pulled, grasped and pulled, and the gryphet clung tenaciously to her flailing arm, even as her shoulder plunged into the book.

Viv gaped in astonishment as Varine’s body vanished into her grimoire. The physicality of it made no sense, a distortion that hurt Viv’s eyes, as though the woman’s flesh compressed as she passed through the page.

And the gryphet went with her.

“Potroast!” cried Fern as her companion vanished into the darkness, followed by Varine’s hips and then the kicking train of her robe.

Viv flung aside her blade and lunged for the book, plunging her own arm in after.

Her fingers touched fur, but nothing living. The trim of Varine’s robe. Viv stretched deeper, dreading the moment when one of the necromancer’s hands would curl around her wrist like cold iron.

Fur again, but warm, followed by the silky brush of feathers.

She dug her fingers into the ruff of Potroast’s neck and yanked back, dragging him into the light with a sucking noise like a boot from cold mud.

Viv tumbled backward with Potroast on her chest, shattering a chair and falling hard on sticks of wood and scattered books.

Fern cried a wordless sound of relief.

The gryphet scrambled away as Viv leapt to her feet and reached the book in two long strides. She seized and closed it tightly, pressing hard from both sides.

Not a moment too soon, as the book pulsed, heavy blows striking the interior of the covers. She grunted, pressing harder and baring her fangs in a grimace. The veins on her forearms stood out as the book fought her with a force that should have been impossible.

Viv dropped to her knees and slammed the book onto the floor, bearing down with both hands as the pounding from within continued … and then weakened … and then ceased altogether.

The four of them waited in breathless silence for seconds that stretched like minutes, and then all at once the bones that bound her friends collapsed with a clatter and a plume of dust. Gallina and Fern fell to the floor amidst gray clouds and brittle shards. The lectern followed in a fountain of phalanges.

“Faithless fucking hells!” cried Fern, pushing herself up to her knees.

“I have to get him out,” said Viv breathlessly.

Or maybe he crumbled just like the rest of them, she thought, and felt her stomach twist.

She reopened the book and frantically tore through the pages until she found the dogear. She let the tome lie still, fearing that at any moment Varine’s wrathful countenance would surge from the blackness and grab her instead. Rising to eclipse that worry was a sick dread that nothing would emerge at all.

Then bony fingers caught the borders of the page, and a horned skull with eyes of blue flame emerged.

“Satchel!” cried Viv, and grasped him by the shoulders to drag him into the open air.

Only his ribcage followed. Viv set him aside as quickly and gently as she could before slamming the book closed and scrambling to her feet.

She snatched Blackblood from the floor, strode to the side table, and placed Varine’s awful book atop it.

With two hands on the greatsword’s hilt, she drove it through both the book and the table beneath it, with a purring rip of leather and a crunch of splintering wood. A shrieking wail arose from the grimoire, and a cold blast of wind burst from between the covers, twirling the loose pages in the room into a blizzard of print.