Bonedust

Chapter One

    “The more distance you put between you and Jeremie, the less power he’ll have over you.”
    Caine’s voice was deadly quiet, his eyes trained on the empty doorway. With a large archway, it opened into a long hall with oaken doors on either side, the flooring a rich ruby fabric twined with glimmers of silver. The only way out of this Goddess-forsaken place was down that hall.
    Gabriel Sharpe slowly snaked a gaze over, his skin twitching with the magick of the vampire blood swelling low in his stomach. For all he knew, it could be booby-trapped, a purely elaborate set-up to get rid of him once and for all. The Bonemaster, Jeremie, was lazy, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have ordered another slave—even Caine—to set something up. This could all be one giant trap.
    He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, a smear of crimson on his pale, scar-etched skin, and shuddered. He’d die before he let that fanged bastard Change him. His lips twisted up in a sneer. He would gladly welcome death.
    “This isn’t going to work…”
    Caine cut him a glare, his green eyes flashing with annoyance and anger. “Do you truly want to be like us? This is the future, Gabriel,” he murmured, spreading his arms wide, stepping towards him. “You have no other choice. Jeremie will be back and when he comes, he’ll take your life as easily as taking candy from a baby. Can you imagine eternity as his unwilling lover?”
    Gabriel didn’t move, didn’t back up, even as his instincts screamed to get far away from here. He kept his breathing even as he met Caine’s gaze. “No.” That one word rumbled with years of pent up, raw emotion. His fists clenched at his sides.
    “Then find Dante Saunders. He is, perhaps, the one man who can help us. The clock’s ticking, princess—you’d better hightail it outta here before J figures out my distraction was just that. Don’t overanalyze this, just go.”
    Gabriel gave a sharp nod and headed for the door on rubbery legs. His heart galloped in his chest like a half-broke kelpie fighting its iron bit and he took shallow breaths through his nose, surprised at the flood of scents insulting his nostrils. He blamed the vampire blood. Goddess. He could still feel the graze of razor fangs across his throat, Jeremie’s lips fluttering against his skin. He shivered again. So close.
    Caine made a ragged sound. “Go!”
    Gabriel didn’t need the push—his bare feet were already pounding across the carpeted stone, making barely a sound. In his mind’s eye, he imagined spider silk wire tied to the doorknob, rigged to keep him in—or else. He swung the door open and flinched, but no gun went off, firing a shot into his skull to spray the wall with blood and bone. It couldn’t be this easy. It just couldn’t be. Heart jumping, he half-ran, half-stumbled down the marble staircase and past a very surprised maid, her feet hobbled with crystallite shackles. She called something out, but the buzz of blood and magick in his head made it impossible to understand her. His hand slammed against the doorknob and praying to every Goddess out there that this was it—that he was free for once in seventeen years—he swung the door open.
    He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. A nest of vamps waiting like cobras around the door? Jeremie to catch his arm so nonchalant like he always did and tut at him before taking him upstairs for a punishment that involved hot knives and salt? Not the open graveyard that stood before him, hauntingly empty in the barest of morning hours.
    The grass was a dull yellow-green, cropped in a buzz cut, dormant from the cold. Weeds stuck up in spikes around the thousands of headstones jutting up like broken teeth from the earth. Gabriel had seen the sight thousands of times before, but it was somehow different this time.
    It was so deadly silent.
    He bolted across the Boneyard, throwing a wary glance over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t leaving a trail of footprints pressed into the grass. He wasn’t. His feet thrummed across hardened earth, pain shooting up his foot as he bashed a toe on a headstone.
    “Shit!” He tripped and fell, scraping his knees on the ground. Then he was up and running once again. His breaths came in short, sharp pants and he ran as though his life depended on it.
    In reality, it did. At least his life as he knew it. Sure, he could stay and become the walking Undead, half-corpse, half-monster like dear Jeremie with his